


The Path Between the Stars

by zaphodsgirl



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Alternate Universe - Labyrinth Fusion, Angst with a Happy Ending, Bisexual Dean Winchester, Child Abandonment, Dean/Cas Big Bang 2019 (Supernatural), F/M, Inappropriate Behavior, M/M, Minor Character Death, Misunderstandings, Mutual Pining, Pansexual Castiel (Supernatural), Post-Labyrinth, Questioning Dean Winchester
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-11-01
Updated: 2019-11-01
Packaged: 2020-12-17 06:03:38
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 9
Words: 53,111
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21049526
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/zaphodsgirl/pseuds/zaphodsgirl
Summary: It's been almost fifteen years since Dean met the enigmatic goblin king, Castiel. After failing to complete the labyrinth with Sam to save baby Adam, Dean is forced to make a deal to secure their freedom.Five years ago he finally gave in to the feelings he’d been keeping at bay for some time, only for Castiel to disappear from his life completely without a word.When Dean relays the story of the labyrinth to Sam's girlfriend Eileen, an opportunity presents itself for him to get some answers...and maybe have a second chance at something he hadn't dared to believe was real.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> ABOUT THE INAPPROPRIATE BEHAVIOR TAG: Dean is seventeen in the beginning of this, so some of Castiel's behavior as far as suggestive language and spying on him with crystals is inappropriate.
> 
> Now that we've gotten that out of the way, on to the fun stuff!
> 
> This fic would never have been completed without my rocks: [Diamond](https://archiveofourown.org/users/A_Diamond), [whichstiel](https://archiveofourown.org/users/whichstiel), [sconestextingandmurder](https://archiveofourown.org/users/sconesandtextingandmurder), and [superhoney](https://archiveofourown.org/users/superhoney), who once again alpha and beta read like a goddamn badass. Every single one of them smacked the matches out of my hand at least once while I was screaming "BURN IT ALL TO THE GROUND" and sobbing uncontrollably.  

> 
> Please go check out all their stuff when you're done here, you won't be disappointed!
> 
> Lastly, hugs and kisses for my artist [dmsilvisart](https://dmsilvisart.tumblr.com/)! I was so thrilled when she picked my story, because I was fortunate enough to work with her on the DeanCas Reverse Bang last year and we had so much fun together. She is an amazing artist and wonderful human, so please be sure to shower the art with love [HERE!](https://dmsilvisart.tumblr.com/post/188749633578/the-path-between-the-stars-art-masterpost)

**"A set of eyes had pinned him, became his version of a kingdom."** – _Glory_, Dermot Kennedy 

"Shhhh, hush now, come on little man," Dean says in the calmest voice he can, pacing the length of the master bedroom in measured steps, bouncing the baby in his arms gently. "I know you want your mommy, I do, but right now you've just got me. I'm sorry, I know it hurts." He walks to the door of the bedroom, peering into the hallway. "Sammy's coming, don't you worry." He sighs in relief as he finally hears heavy footfalls clomping up the stairs, returning to his pacing and rocking. 

"Here you go, Dean," a boy of thirteen says as he tumbles gracelessly into the room, holding out a blue plastic ring filled with gel, chilled and firm now from the freezer. 

"Lifesaver, thanks." Dean takes it gratefully with one hand, cradling the baby in his other arm as it wails, gently inserting one end of the ring into his mouth and letting the coolness touch his sore gums. It takes a few minutes, but eventually Adam reaches up to clasp the ring himself, chewing on it with enthusiasm. Dean sinks with relief into the rocking chair in the corner.

"Can we go back to watching the movie now?" Sam crosses his arms with an affected pout, irritated at having his birthday movie marathon interrupted by the wailing of a baby, even if he _is _their half-brother. Not that either of them knew about him until six months ago.

"I need maybe half an hour to soothe him and get him back to sleep," Dean says, keeping his eyes on Adam, who doesn't seem the least bit sleepy at the moment. "You can keep watching without me if you want. I'll get back down as soon as I can."

"Fine," Sam says icily, practically storming from the room in an overdramatic huff, clattering down the stairs with as much noise as he can muster and throwing himself onto the couch. He doesn't know why Dean has to spend so much time with that stupid baby. Can't he just put him back in his crib and let him cry himself to sleep? After all, it's Sam's birthday today, and Dean is supposed to be doing whatever _he _wants to do. And he would be, if not for Dad taking his stupid wife on a date and leaving them with the stupid baby. 

He jabs at the button on the remote to start _Raiders of the Lost Ark_ back up, sinking into the couch without paying attention to it. Truth be told, the house they reside in now is much better than the motels he's spent his life in, and Kate is actually really nice and a much better cook than Dean. Sam just doesn't understand why Dean has to take care of the baby all the time. His own mother should stay home and do it. That's _her _job, he thinks arrogantly, not his brother's.

When Dean still hasn't come down an hour later Sam storms back up the stairs, peering into the master bedroom. Dean is still in the rocking chair, only now Adam is laying on his chest, his chubby face tucked into Dean's neck. Dean has both hands on his back, holding him in place, and as Sam creeps closer he sees that both of them are sound asleep. It makes him angry, angry in a way he knows is probably undeserved but can't control anyway. 

"Dean," he says sharply, flicking his brother's ear.

"Ow," Dean says, managing to wake up without jolting the baby. "What gives, man?"

"You fell asleep. You were supposed to be back down half an hour ago."

"Alright, alright," Dean mutters, standing up carefully, keeping Adam cradled against him as he moves to the crib, then gently setting him down inside and tucking a blanket around him. "Let me use the bathroom, then we'll head back down."

Sam lingers in the bedroom as his brother goes into the hall, but when he hears the click of the door he moves to the crib, staring down at the tiny sleeping form within it. 

"I wish you'd go away," he whispers. "You're ruining everything. Dean's supposed to do whatever I want for my birthday: play the games I choose, make what I want for dinner, watch the movies I pick. When I was little he would let me pick whatever story I wanted him to read, and..." He remembers all those scary stories he used to beg for, how they fascinated and frightened him all at the same time. It’s been a while since Dean read him a bedtime story but he still remembers his favorite, a story of magic and mazes and goblins and their king, still has the tattered book even though he memorized the story long ago. "Wouldn't it be perfect," he says softly, studying the sleeping baby, "if stories like that were real." He heads to the doorway when he hears the toilet flush down the hall, turning to flick the light switch to the off position, a specific line popping into his head as he does, and he turns to face the crib. "I wish the goblins _would _come and take you away. Right now."

A flash of lightning brightens the dark space, and out of the corner of his eye something moves. He whips back quickly, and as the light fades he sees shadows dart into all the corners of the room just as a clap of thunder rattles the windowpane.

"Adam?" Sam is frozen in place, even as Dean comes up behind him. 

"What's wrong?" Dean puts a hand on his shoulder, shaking him slightly. "Sam, what is it?" Rain begins to pelt the glass, and thunder rumbles in the distance. "I didn't know it was supposed to storm tonight, I hope it doesn't wake the baby again." He peers down at his little brother. "Are you okay? You're as white as a sheet."

"I..." All he can do is point, and Dean frowns at him, looking into the room, blinking into another flash of lightning. "What is it? Is it Adam?" 

Sam can only nod, and Dean quickly takes the dozen steps to cross the room and peer into the crib that's cast in shadow now, unable to see more than the vague shape of the baby under the blanket. He reaches in to touch Adam's stomach and reassure himself that he's okay, but the blanket crumples beneath his hand as if it only covers air, then wriggles out from under his fingers with the sound of muffled giggling.

"What the hell? Adam!" He tosses the blanket aside but finds nothing, feeling around on the tiny mattress, tossing one stuffed animal after another to the floor as he searches in vain for the little body that should be there. Dean turns sharply, hearing low laughter behind him, words to chastise Sam on the tip of his tongue, but the boy is frozen still in the doorway with a look of horror on his face. "Sam? What happened? What did you do?"

"I didn't...I didn't mean to..." 

"Didn't mean to what?" Dean can hear strange tittering sounds all about the room, and he turns quickly to try and pinpoint them as the rain starts beating harder against the roof. The room is briefly illuminated in flashes, and his panic is only increased by the crash of thunder that now seems to be right above them. 

Sam runs to his brother, throwing his arms around his waist. "I'm sorry! I'm sorry, Dean, he's coming and it's my fault!"

"What are you talking about?" Sam gets no chance to answer as the French doors in the room fly open, and Dean instinctively turns away to shield his brother. Wind from the storm is whipping the curtains into the room, serving to frame the tall figure that appears in silhouette, outlined by moon and mystery as he strides into the room to stand before them. Dean turns, pushing Sam behind him, backing away as the man comes to a stop. He's dressed all in black, a high-collared cloak falling from his shoulders to the floor. Parts of his costume catch the lightning, flashing like black diamonds in the darkness of the room. He's an imposing figure with pale skin and dark hair, and as Dean takes in the striking features of that face he can't help but swallow. He should be afraid, and he is, but there's a part of him that is equally enthralled at the appearance of this stranger. 

"Well, well, well," the man says, adjusting his gloves and flexing his fingers. "What have we here?"

"Who are you?" Dean says as adrenaline makes his heart race. 

"You know very well who I am," the man says, curling one lip as he peers under Dean's outstretched arms. "Don't you, Sam?"

“How do you know his name?” 

“I know the name of all who invoke me.”

“And who the hell are you?”

"He’s the goblin king," Sam hisses.

"The who?" Dean whispers over his shoulder, and Sam elbows him in the ribs.

"From that book you used to read to me when I was little, remember?"

"Those were just old legends, Sam, they're not real."

"Oh, but I'm very real, I can assure you," the man says, taking a step forward and gracefully holding out one tightly gloved hand, his long fingers curled slightly in invitation. "Would you like to touch for yourself?"

"No," Dean says quickly, his hand twitching to do just that. "Why are you here? What do you want?"

"Want? There's nothing I want, boy," and at that Dean stands straight, rolling his shoulders back to glare at the so-called goblin king who stands a few inches above him, but only because he's wearing heeled boots. "I merely came to get that which was given to me."

"I didn't mean it!" Sam blurts out suddenly, moving in front of Dean, who puts his hands on Sam's shoulders to hold him back. "Please, it was a mistake. Give us back our brother."

"You took Adam? You can't do that!"

"I most certainly can, especially when I've been asked properly."

"Please," Sam begs, glancing up at Dean with a look of contrition. "We need our brother back." 

The goblin king stares down at the boy, more than a head shorter than he is, and makes a tutting noise. "What's done is done, child."

"Please," Dean says now. "Sam's just a kid, he didn't know any better. Adam needs me to take care of him." The goblin king's eyes narrow at this. "There must be something we can do to get him back." 

"Boys," the King says firmly. "Go back downstairs, turn on your movie. Forget about the baby."

"We can't," Dean says, Sam nodding before him. "Don't you see that we can't?"

"But he's there," the King says, turning to point through the window into the distance. "In my castle." 

Dean is about to argue, to point out the obvious -- that there's nothing there but the neighbor's house, exactly like their own -- but Sam's gasp makes him look in the indicated direction. Instead of the oak tree in the yard and the brick wall of the house beyond, a different landscape twinkles in the distance, a giant maze of dark twisting hedges and stone walls. He walks toward the opening in awe. 

"What the hell?"

"That's the castle beyond the goblin city, don't you remember, Dean?" Sam says breathlessly, tugging on his brother's sleeve, forgetting the trouble they're in with his excitement. "If we can make it through the labyrinth, we can get Adam back! That's what it said in the book."

"It doesn't look that far."

"It's further than you think," a dark voice says in his ear, and Dean turns sharply, unsettled by the goblin king's close proximity. He realizes they're now standing on a hillside just before the maze, beside a tree that inexplicably has a strange clock hanging in its branches. "I don't think young Sam here has what it takes to make it to the center."

"Well, he's not going. I am."

"Dean..."

"It was Sam's wish that had young Adam whisked away to my castle. Only he who invokes the spell has the power to break it."

Sam tugs on Dean's shirt, his young face determined. "I have to go, Dean. It was my fault. I can bring him back, I promise."

Dean studies the goblin king, waiting patiently without moving a muscle, but Dean could swear he has a swagger even as he's standing still. The figure he cuts is imposing, astonishing, and Dean feels a little bit breathless with something he can't quite name. 

"Both of us," he says, earning a raised eyebrow. "Sam is my responsibility as much as Adam."

The goblin king considers them each in turn, than smirks. "As you wish." He raises a hand, twirling a finger in the direction of the clock, and the hands on it start to spin counter-clockwise. "You have thirteen hours in which to solve my labyrinth." His form starts to soften at the edges, as though blending into the landscape behind him. "After that, your baby brother becomes one of us." His form turns translucent, and he glances at Sam before turning the full force of his gaze on Dean. "Forever." His eyes glitter as he finally fades away, and Dean blinks in astonishment. 

"Sam, what the fuck is happening."

"Come on. I'll explain on the way, but we better start moving." He grabs Dean's hand and pulls him down the hill. 

“This is not what I had in mind when I said we could do whatever you want for your birthday.”

They reach the outer wall of the maze, towering above their heads and decorated with half-dead brambles and vines. 

"There's got to be an entrance," Dean mutters as they slowly walk along the perimeter. "What the hell have you gotten us into, Sammy? Is this some kind of shared hallucination?"

"I don't think so." Sam shakes his head sadly. "I messed up, Dean. I said the right words, even though I didn't really mean it."

"Jesus," Dean says, pinching his nose and breathing out slowly. "I can't believe you conjured a real-life fairy tale bad guy and now we have to rescue Adam from his clutches."

"Oh, this will surely be amusing," says a new voice with a strange accent. "You two think you're going to get through the labyrinth?" A small man dressed in all black is grinning at them from several feet away, and though he's holding something in his hands it doesn't seem to be a weapon. 

"Excuse me," Sam says politely. "Do you know where we can find the entrance?"

The man chuckles, shaking his head. "Of course I know how you get in, lad.” He grins, winking at Dean like they’re sharing a joke. “It's getting out that will be the problem." He turns his back to them, busying himself with whatever he's doing, and Sam looks at Dean with a shrug.

"So, can you actually tell us how?"

"That depends," the man says, looking over his shoulder with a raised eyebrow. "What's in it for me? Nothing is free, here, everything has a price."

"I have this," Sam says, holding out a twenty dollar bill. "I got it for my birthday. You can have it if you help us?"

"A piece of paper? What am I supposed to do with that? Only shiny things are worth anything around here, boy."

"What about this?" Dean says, pulling a hammered silver ring off his right hand. It’s not expensive, and certainly not elaborate, but it’s the shiniest thing on his person. 

"That'll do," the man says, reaching up to snatch it from Dean's hand, holding it up to the light, twisting it this way and that before slipping it into a pocket. "Come on, lads, light's a wasting." 

He takes several steps away from them, pulling back brittle foliage that falls like a curtain over the stone, pushing on the wall behind it. It gives way easily at his touch, opening before them like a door, and the man gestures grandly at the passageway. 

"My name is Crowley, and I will be your escort. Right this way."

They follow him through the opening, and Dean tries not to shudder when the door slams behind them.

***

There is less than an hour of time left when Dean and Sam finally reach the castle, though it feels as though they've spent days solving the puzzles in the labyrinth. It's only because of the friends they've made along the way that they've gotten so far, otherwise they'd still be trapped in the prison of the oubliette. Crowley pulled them out of that one, though he was often as much of a hindrance as a help.

The goblin king himself tried several times to interfere with their progress: adding last minute obstacles, showing up to challenge them, doing things to tempt them to choose another course. 

Dean had come close to giving in to one particular temptation, at a masquerade ball he'd found his way to in some kind of a fever dream. He'd taken a bite of a peach Crowley had offered, wanting to make sure it was okay before he handed it to Sam; but his mind started swimming and the next thing he knew he was in a ballroom full of costumed revelers at a party celebrating he knew not what. 

He’d moved through the crowd searching for someone, not knowing exactly who until he felt a hand in his, pulling him into a dance. He'd been both confused and exhilarated to be pressed close to a partner in the middle of a ballroom, the mask hiding his facial features doing nothing to dim the bright blue gleam of his eyes, eyes that made Dean shiver. 

They'd moved about the room in circles, and though he knew they were surrounded Dean could see nothing but the king. His gaze travelled from those eyes to his lips as if magnetized, wondering what it would be like just lean in just for a taste, if it would be anything like the girls he'd kissed on summer fairgrounds...

He'd regained his reason almost too late, thoughts of summers and Sam crowding into his mind like rushing water, shoving him away from the warm body he'd been pressed against to run and run and run to the edge of the ballroom, shattering the invisible barrier and tumbling down and down into consciousness. He wouldn't answer for where he'd been when he found Sam again, in the company of a knightly fox riding a shaggy dog and a gentle giant of a monster that spoke to rocks as though they were friends, and Crowley had shrugged when Dean accused him of trickery.

He puts all that aside now as they finally enter the throne room of the castle only to find it empty, a single staircase winding upwards the only exit. He knows Sam is right behind him as he runs to the top of it, but when it opens to a confusing room full of mirrored doorways and twisting stairs he sees that he and Sam have been separated somehow, and far below them is the prize they've come for: Adam.

"There he is!" Dean cries, racing down the nearest staircase, trying vainly to find a way to his little brother. Sam is on an opposite staircase, calling out his progress as he goes, but neither of them seem to be getting any closer to their prize or each other. As the clock begins to toll, Dean makes a desperate leap of faith and jumps. 

***

Dean falls in slow motion as the chimes toll up to the thirteenth hour, finally landing softly on the same dusty hill where they began, on his knees before the goblin king. He stands quickly, taking a few steps back, scanning the landscape for Sam.

Where he'd been draped in all black at their first meeting, the king is now bedecked in white like a bride come to church. 

"Well, well, well," he says, tapping the riding crop he holds against the bleached leather of one knee-high boot, surveying the bedraggled boy before him. "Dean Winchester. Through dangers untold, and hardships unnumbered, you have reached the castle beyond the Goblin City after all." His eyes twinkle as he walks in a slow circle around the young man who stands defiant before him, fists clenched, chin held high. "What would you have of me now?"

"I just want to take my brothers and go home."

"Is that all?" The goblin king has a twinkle in his eye when he holds his crop under Dean's chin to lift it even higher. "Is that all the reward you would ask for? You lack imagination, young Dean."

"That's what you think," Dean says before he can think better of it, because it’s actually been running wild ever since he set eyes on this man. It's not imagination he lacks, only the courage to voice it. 

"Yes, yes," the king says, standing to face Dean once again, hands clasped before him, crop dangling from his long fingers to brush at the dusty earth on which they stand. "Except that I'm afraid I can't give you what you want."

"What?" Dean's heart drops into the pit of his stomach, the sense of betrayal both keen and unsurprising, for the goblin king is untrustworthy and nothing in this realm is as simple as it seems. "That's not fair!"

"Always about what's _fair _with you, makes me wonder what your basis of comparison is. Two of you ran the labyrinth," he says as takes an exaggerated look at the landscape, his arms sweeping around the space before he fixes his gaze once again on Dean, "but only one of you is here, and I told you at the start: _only he who invokes the spell has the power to break it_." 

The sweat beading on the back of Dean's neck turns cold, and he can feel the icy trickle of it tracing a path between his shoulder blades. "He's here, he reached the castle with me..."

"But only you have reached the end," the king says solemnly, and Dean falls to his knees again, hanging his head, hands dangling between his knees. 

"Please, you can't."

"Oh, but I think you'll find that I can."

Dean looks up, his gaze unflinching as he stares into the eyes of the goblin king, hard like the sapphires evoked by their color. "Let us go home. I'm begging you." Something flickers across the king's face when he says that, but Dean doesn't catch what it is. "Adam's just a baby, and Sam has his whole life ahead of him. I'll do anything."

"You have nothing to bargain with, you arrogant boy, do not trifle with me." 

Dean drops his head again, fingers gripping desperately at his knees, his mind racing as he seeks a way out of this dilemma, a way to save them. 

"Is there nothing you want?" It's only a moment, but as he looks up through his lashes Dean can see surprise cross that stunning face, quickly supplanted by triumph. "There must be something I can give you," he says, and he's not so young that he doesn't know the double meaning in those words. "Please, Castiel." 

The king startles at the use of his true name, taking a few steps back, and Dean closes his eyes, waiting. He doesn't know what compels him to use it, only knows it because Crowley had let it slip -- but there's power in a name, and he's old enough to understand that letting it fall from his lips is a promise like no other. 

He doesn't know how much time passes before he feels a finger under his chin, tilting his head up, and as he meets Castiel's gaze he can see a torrent of emotion in those eyes. It would seem the goblin king is not entirely stoic, unaffected, cold. Dean doesn't speak, only stares back, showing his sincerity in every line of his face. He draws in a ragged breath as Castiel runs a thumb lightly across his bottom lip and sighs. Dean feels every moment that those fingers drag across the line of his jaw as Castiel slowly pulls away. "You're no more than a boy. What will the man you become make of the promise you swear now as a child?" 

"I'm not a child, and I would do anything to save Sam." He says it with vehemence, and Castiel raises an eyebrow, watching him. Dean can feel the warmth of his own blood pumping through his veins, hear the sharp intake of his own breath. Since the moment Castiel had appeared before him, all swirling cloak and barely tethered danger, Dean had felt drawn to him. He doesn't yet have the words to describe the twisting sensation in his gut when the goblin king is close to him, but whatever it is holds hands with anger and shame. 

"What is it that compels you to such sacrifice for a mere stripling?" Castiel tilts his head, studying Dean carefully.

"He's my brother. They both are. Family makes sacrifices for each other."

Castiel contemplates this, the confusion on his face evident, and it occurs to Dean that maybe the goblin king, charged with taking the unloved and the unwanted, has simply never encountered the concept before. 

"I will return you and your brothers home,” Castiel says. “If, in exchange, you will give up one night every year to spend in the goblin realm. With me."

"For what?" He's not afraid of what Castiel will suggest as much as he's afraid he won't say no.

"You can sate my...curiosity about humanity." He looks Dean up and down. "Mayhap there are some things I can teach you in exchange."

They regard one another, and a dozen different scenarios flash through Dean’s mind, each of them confusing and exhilarating as well as terrifying by degrees. 

“And if I don’t agree?”

“Then you can leave. Alone. The choice is yours.”

He thinks about returning home to the dark house where he feels like a stranger, trying to explain to John and Kate why the crib is empty, why Sam is also missing. He remembers one year at a motel in Wisconsin when he’d left Sam alone in room, sound asleep but only six years old, because he was bored and wanted to get out. He’d returned two hours later with a package of Red Vines clutched in his fist, only to open the door to the shock of John at home unexpectedly, sitting on the closest bed with a look of such chagrin that Dean had never left Sam alone ever again. 

He blinks the memory away, John’s dark-eyed disappointment being replaced by blue intrigue. Dean nods, once. In the blink of an eye the goblin king is close enough to touch, and Dean gasps as he leans in, his lips barely brushing a cheekbone as he whispers in Dean's ear.

"We must seal our agreement," he says, lowly, and Dean audibly swallows as Castiel pulls back just far enough to stare into his eyes until Dean closes his, unable to bear that ice blue gaze any longer. 

Cool lips press against his own like a flicker of wind, and as his eyelids flutter open Castiel smiles, then snaps his fingers. Suddenly Dean feels like he’s falling, caught up in a tempest of magic that turns him round and round until he has to close his eyes, dizzy and confused. He's enveloped in the rushing sound of wind and beating wings as the world falls down around him, and this time there are no helping hands to catch him, no oubliette to break his fall. Descending and descending into blackness, into nothingness...and then there's something solid beneath his hands and he clenches his fingers into what feels like carpet at the same time that he realizes he's no longer moving. 

He opens his eyes to find himself back in the master bedroom, the place where their journey began, and Sam is lying on the carpet beside him. 

"Sam!" He rolls towards his brother, shaking him lightly. "Sammy!"

"Dean?" His eyes blink a few times before flying open, then clutching at Dean's arm. "What happened? I was right behind you at the end and then suddenly I was lost, and I couldn't find you, where did you go? Where are we?"

"We're home, Sammy," Dean says. "Everything is okay now."

"What do you mean? Is Adam here?"

Dean leaps up, racing to the crib against the wall, and nearly crumples to the floor once again in relief when he sees the baby lying there, asleep and seemingly unaffected. His bottom lip quivers, as if his dreams disturb him, and Dean reaches out to put a hand on his stomach to make sure he's not a changeling, that it's not another trick, that the goblin king has sent them home in failure...

Adam's body feels warm and real and alive, his little chest rising and falling under Dean's hand as he dreams. 

"He's here. He's okay." 

"I'm sorry!" Sam says, throwing his arms around Dean's waist to bury his face in his chest. "I was mad, I didn't mean to do it, I didn't think it was really _real..." _

"Hey, hey," Dean soothes, rocking his younger brother as he sniffles into his shirt. "I know you were happier when it was just the two of us, just you and me against everything, yeah? But things are different now, and we both have to adjust. You're growing up, Sammy, you don't need me to take care of you all the time." He pushes Sam away a little, turning him to face the crib. "Adam is helpless, and innocent, and he needs us to protect him now. You proved to me you can do that when you stood up to the goblin king and demanded he bring him back."

"I would never have gotten through it without you, Dean." 

"Maybe, but it doesn't matter. We're home now, but we're still a team. Team Big Brothers. Okay?" Sam nods, and Dean ruffles his hair before walking him out of the room to let the baby continue sleeping. As they reach the bottom of the stairs Dean glances at the clock, shocked to see that it's still only midnight, as if time has been bent around their absence.

When their father and Kate come home two hours later, Sam is sound asleep on the couch, his head in his older brother's lap. Dean's eyes are on the television, _Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom_ almost at an end.

"Was everything alright?" John asks gruffly.

"Of course," he says, grinning back and hoping it doesn't look as fake as it feels. 

“You boys should get to bed.” 

Dean nods as his dad claps him on the shoulder, then wakes Sam and follows him upstairs. Sam goes back to sleep easily, but Dean can’t stop the perpetual motion of his thoughts. He stares at the ceiling for a long time, turning over the night's events in his mind, reevaluating his world view to incorporate magic and fairies and goblins and a faraway land, hidden from human perception.

Dean finally falls asleep, eyes drifting shut in the cavernous dark of the midnight hour, listening to the breeze shuffle through the leaves outside his window, where a lone owl perches. 


	2. Chapter 2

Castiel returns to his castle in a swirl of feathers and bad temper, snapping his cloak away and flopping into the throne at the far end of the room. 

"Foolish boy," he mutters under his breath, snapping the riding crop against the inside calf of his left boot, slung carelessly over one arm of the simple throne. "I move the stars for no one! How dare he seek to take more than he's earned after all I've done for him."

"Is it really the boy you're mad at, or yourself?" says a knowing voice from the doorway, and Castiel covers his eyes with his free hand.

"What are _you _doing here? I told you not to visit while I am preoccupied."

"And when have I ever followed your instructions if I felt they didn't suit me?"

"Insolent fool," Castiel spits in his direction. "I don't know why I put up with you."

"I don't know why you continue to play the tyrant with me, when I've known you too long to think it has any merit."

Balthazar leans against the doorframe with his arms crossed, regarding his brother without saying anything else. Castiel sneers at him across the throne room, empty of anything except the detritus of dozens of goblins that are off doing mischief elsewhere, then twists to sit properly in the throne and put his head in his hands.

"I should not have let them come here, Balthazar," he finally says, sitting up with a sigh. "People ask me to take their children away and I oblige, there's not supposed to be any bargaining. Have I lost my capacity for cruelty?"

"Lost?" Balthazar laughs, shaking his head. "You never had it in the first place. You didn't choose to be what you are, so your heart's never been in it." He pushes himself off the doorframe, ambling into the room. "You were touched by how much those boys wanted to get their brother back, weren't you?" Castiel looks away, but Balthazar nods sagely. "Tell me: how many others have defied you to have their loved ones returned to them?"

Castiel looks at Balthazar's smug, knowing face, and sighs. "None."

"I knew from the moment you brought them here that it was all for show. You would have let them have their brother back right away, but you wanted to teach that young one a lesson first." Balthazar nods to himself, sitting on the steps leading up to the throne. "I think that was a good thing you did."

"I don't want to discuss this with you. Leave me."

"We are going to discuss it, eventually.”

“_Fine_. But not today.” 

Balthazar raises an eyebrow before he exits the way he came, and Castiel stares at the doorway long after he's gone, leaning on his knees and wondering what he's gotten himself into.

He trudges out of the throne room and up the stairs that Sam and Dean had taken when they reached the castle, only this time they open on a lone corridor that leads to a single door. Beyond it is a single large room, a massive bed made up with dark linens and pillows at the center of it all. Castiel bypasses that for now, heading out the open doors onto the balcony, surveying his kingdom shrouded in darkness below. 

He conjures a crystal with a flick of his wrist, peering into its depths, his gaze made manifest on earth in the form of an owl, and watches Dean Winchester sleep.

“One year from now, I shall see you again,” he whispers, then tosses the crystal up into the night sky, watching it float away and hoping his uncertainty goes with it. 

***

It takes another month before Sam broaches the subject that neither of them dare to talk about. Adam is asleep upstairs as Sam and Dean play _Super Mario 3_ on a used console Dean had found at the Goodwill years ago and gotten working again -- before they ever knew about Kate, when their lives still consisted of following their father from one fair to another and living in a string of nondescript motels -- when Sam pauses the game without warning.

Dean knows what Sam wants to talk about even before he speaks, and he's surprised it's taken this long. Maybe because this is the first time John and Kate have been out of the house at the same time since it happened, to watch some local band play at the bar downtown, and Sam needed to be sure there was no chance anyone would overhear.

Even so he doesn't speak right away, just sitting cross-legged on the floor and staring at the television, holding the controller loosely in his hands. Dean doesn't prompt him, instead watching the firm set of Sam's shoulders from where he's sprawled on the couch until the moment they release and Sam turns a bit to face him.

"Did that really happen?" He sounds so small when he asks, so unsure, and Dean sits up to put a hand on his shoulder. "Some days I think it was just a dream I had while I was awake." He gives Dean a plaintive look. "I don't know what I want to be true. If it was real, then I did a bad thing to put us there. If it wasn't real, then something else is wrong with me."

"Hey, there's nothing wrong with you. It was real, Sammy. I promise you, every moment was real. And yes, you did a bad thing, but at least you recognize that and you wanted to fix it, and that part is a good thing."

Sam nods, looking at his hands. "Are you mad at me for what happened?"

"I was, at first. I'm not now. I understand that you were frustrated."

"Have you been thinking about it a lot?"

"Not at all," Dean says, and it's the first of many lies he will tell his brother, and himself, about their experience in the labyrinth. Dean can still remember every twist and turn of their adventure with a startling clarity, even those parts that he wishes he could forget. 

"Do you think Adam remembers?"

"He's still just a baby, Sam. He's too young too remember anything. Just like you don't remember the house you were born in or..."

"Or Mom." 

"Yeah," Dean agrees with a sigh.

Sam studies Dean's face, as if he senses the lie there, then looks away. "There are some parts I don't mind forgetting. The cleaners. The oubliette." He shudders when he says this, the word a whisper on his lips, and Dean closes his eyes at the memory of the dark, tight space. "I don't ever want to tell anyone. Who would believe me? The kids at school tease me enough as it is, call me Kid Carney. I don't need them calling me Crazy Kid Carney next year."

Dean sits up, leaning onto his knees. "It'll be our secret, Sammy. Just you and me. No one ever has to know about it." 

"I want to pretend it never happened. Can we do that?"

Dean hesitates. He wants to ask Sam if he dreams of that night, if he has the same kind as Dean: a strange mixture of things real and unreal, swirls of color and muted sound; a blur of sensation that gets a bit clearer each night, like a computer image taking a long time to render. In all of them is the sensation of someone waiting, the mask on his face doing nothing to hide the eyes that Dean feels are imprinted on his psyche. 

Instead he looks at Sam's face, full of trepidation, and lies again.

"Yeah. We can do that. If we pretend long enough, it might even become true."

“Team Big Brothers?” Sam asks hopefully, holding out his fist. Dean grins, bumping it with his own.

“Team Big Brothers,” he agrees. “Now unpause the game so I can kick your ass some more.”

***

"You're watching him again, aren't you?"

Castiel looks away from the crystal he's been holding aloft with his fingertips, narrowing his eyes at Balthazar, who holds his hands up in mock deference. 

"I'm just observing."

"Right," Balthazar says in an unconvincing tone. "Why don't you just admit you're attracted to him?"

"Don't be foolish. He's a child."

"In human terms he's nearly a man, and given the way he cared for his kin I'd say he's actually been one for quite some time already. Certainly a normal boy would have just turned away after you'd stolen his brother."

"I did not _steal _him, I was _asked _to take him, how can you not understand that concept after all this time?"

"In any case," Balthazar says loudly, barrelling past the argument. "What is your obsession with this human?”

"I am simply...curious."

Balthazar throws up his hands in frustration. "Is there nothing else in all the realms to pique your curiosity? What are you planning to do with him, Castiel? Take him as a lover?" 

"Would he want me to?" Castiel muses.

"Not if he has any sense," Balthazar says, and Castiel throws the crystal in his direction, hitting the doorframe where it bursts, showering him with tiny white feathers instead of glass. "That's the kind of thing I'm talking about. Impulse control. You should learn some if you ever want to be anything but a tyrant in that boy's eyes."

"And how do you know that's not what I want," Castiel says sulkily, conjuring another crystal as easily as the first was destroyed. "I am the goblin king. Everyone should fear me. It pleases me to see them tremble before me."

"Just because that's the only thing you know doesn't mean you enjoy it."

"Go away," Castiel finally sighs.

"I want to help you," Balthazar says gently.

"Help me what?"

"Do something more than sit in your throne sulking all the time, waiting for the next hopeless ass to ask you to whisk their kid away." His eyes grow somber, his mien more serious than usual. "It wears on you, Castiel. It always has."

"It doesn't matter. I am what I was made to be." Castiel looks into the crystal again, staring hard at the figures within. "What is it about him that undoes me?"

"No one has ever bested you before."

"Perhaps."

Balthazar sighs. "It will take a single night for you to grow bored of this boy, Castiel, I promise. Bring him here now, sate your curiosity, and get him out of your system. You'll be happier for it, I promise you."

"No," Castiel says sharply. "We have an appointment."

"Then it will only take a year for me to be proven right." Balthazar rolls his eyes as he leaves the room as dramatically as possible, and Castiel tosses the crystal onto the floor at his feet, watching it shatter into a burst of tiny stars.

***

It feels strange to Dean when he starts the first day of senior year just like all the rest of his peers, more or less: new class schedule, new locker combination, new mix of students in the cafeteria during lunchtime. It's just that he still feels like the new kid, even though he'd started school here the year before. Just a nameless entity that's practically invisible to everyone around him. He hopes it will be better for Sam when he becomes a freshman next year, but for now he needs to get through it himself. 

He finds his homeroom and an empty seat in the back corner, where he broods after roll call waiting for the bell to ring as all the students around him exchange stories about what they did over the summer. 

Dean had gotten a job at the community pool, oddly enough, or maybe not so odd -- he knew how to fix things and handle money, which came in handy at the snack bar or when equipment was on the fritz, and he knew enough first aid that he passed the lifeguard test, too. He would marvel at all the carefree kids turning darker in the sun under the watchful eyes of their parents, reapplying sunscreen on their tender skin before it reddened and making sure they get something to eat. He'd spent the whole summer wondering if it was the kind of life they might have known if Mary Winchester had lived. He tried to picture them all together as a family: Mary's blond hair shining in the sun, John lounging on a towel next to her in a pair of swim trunks, Sam playing Marco Polo in the water with kids he'd grown up with all his life. 

He doesn't have any friends to talk to about what he did the past few months, or what it's like to miss someone you can't even remember, or worry that you may have committed yourself to being some kind of sex slave...

"This seat taken?" He snaps out of his reverie to see a petite redhead pointing to the seat beside him, the strap of her messenger bag obscuring what looks like a _Goonies _t-shirt. He shakes his head, sitting up straight as she slides into the seat. "You new, too?"

"I might as well be. I started middle of last year." 

She nods, as though she expects this. "Yeah, that always sucks ass. Is the computer lab at least decent?"

"No idea. I don't know much about computers." He gestures to her shirt. "Movies, though, that I know about. Who's your favorite?"

She glances down at herself, as though she'd forgotten what was there. Maybe she had. But when she looks up at him she smiles. 

"Charlie."

"None of them are named Charlie."

"No, that's my name. I figured I should introduce myself before we fight about why Data rules."

He grins back, putting out a hand. "I'm Dean. I'll be making the case for Mouth."

"Oh, this fight might take additional time over lunch to resolve. What's your schedule?"

They compare notes to find they have most of their classes together and share the same lunch period. Suddenly the coming year doesn't look as bleak as he was expecting.

***

Dean's favorite class turns out to be one that he and Charlie don't share, though all the classes they have together are made better by her company. For seventh period they part ways in the south stairwell, Charlie going one flight up for computer science while Dean heads down to the basement for wood shop.

He's always been good with his hands, tinkering with things and fixing them, a skill originally learned more out of necessity than desire. He likes being able to create something new, even something as simple as a table. He likes the smell of the shop: the clean scent of shaved wood as it curls onto the floor around his feet, the acrid notes of a soldering iron leaving its mark in the grain, the sharp tang as a table saw severs a piece in two. 

The shop teacher is a crusty old sod in a wheelchair named Mr. Singer, gruff in mannerism and speech, impatient with most of the kids who think his class is an excuse to goof off. Dean is not one of those, so Mr. Singer treats him with an indulgence that he pretends is reluctant, but his eyes glisten with pride whenever his most eager student demonstrates how quickly he's learned a new skill. 

He doesn’t tell him so, but Dean feels like Mr. Singer is more of a father figure to him than John ever has been. If Dean were another teenager he might resent his father for all the ways he failed them, but instead he just feels resigned. Besides, Sam resents it enough for both of them, though he always directs his ire at John and not at their baby brother; he learned a valuable lesson running the labyrinth, and Dean supposes he should be grateful for that. Dean desperately wants to ask him about it, but the promise he made stills his tongue. He doesn't want to be responsible for making Sam relive that night, for making him feel guilty, which will be made worse if he slips and tells Sam that he traded himself for one night every year in exchange for their freedom. 

His interaction with the goblin king at the very end haunts his dreams sometimes, popping with a clarity that even the waking world sometimes lacks. Castiel so close to him, as though they're intimate acquaintances, gazing into one another's eyes like they have all the time in the world. Each time he wakes from one of these he feels longing stronger than any he’s ever felt for a home, a friend, or the mother he lost too soon. 

One afternoon Dean rifles through the bookshelf on Sam's side of the room, pulling out the copy of supernatural tales that got them into the mess in the first place. The binding is still intact, but the front is so badly worn that the image and title are illegible. The pages are thick, yellowed with time, and he inhales the smell of aged vanilla as he riffles them with his thumb. Sitting on his bed, he carefully turns the pages until he finds what he's looking for.

"Well, that doesn't look anything like Castiel," he mutters at one of the illustrations before he turns back to the start. He reads the story again, carefully, looking for anything that will help him understand. There are parts he can absolutely verify now are real, but others he finds difficult to believe, and he tosses the book to the floor in frustration. 

***

Dean turns eighteen a few weeks after the long holiday break, on a bleak Monday morning of thirty degrees. John actually smiles when he comes into the kitchen, pulling him into a rare hug and clapping him on the back before turning back to his coffee. Sam looks up from his cereal long enough to say "Happy birthday, jerk" and then goes back to shoving corn flakes into his mouth and reading his book.

He expects nothing else for the rest of the day, so it's a pleasant surprise to find that Charlie has decorated his locker with a _Star Wars _theme, and the result is a lot of random people who've never spoken to him before wishing him a happy birthday as the day goes on. At lunch he wraps Charlie in a hug so tight she squeals, then punches him lightly in the ribs. 

"Stop it, you're gonna make everybody think I'm straight!"

Nothing is as surprising as the end of shop class, though, when Mr. Singer places a cupcake with a single burning candle on his work table as he finishes cleaning up. Dean just stares at it, with its festive wrapper and its generous swirl of white frosting. 

"Happy birthday," the teacher says before he wheels away without another word, before Dean can even croak out a thank you past all the emotions in his throat. He blows out the candle, then carefully peels the wrapping off.

The cake is chocolate, perfectly baked, moist and rich and sweet with vanilla frosting. It's the first birthday cake he's ever had in his life. He folds the wrapper as small as he can get it and tucks it into the inner pocket of his jacket, and that night before he goes to bed he places it carefully into a cigar box he keeps under his bed, his receptacle of worthless treasures. 

***

The months roll on, and Dean's life changes in ways that seem small but loom large when he looks back on them in ten years time. He tries to picture a future for himself as he reads the same university brochures as everyone else but nothing appeals to him, and he thinks that's for the best since affording any of them is out of his reach. The guidance counselor suggests trade school, which sounds much more appealing, but no amount of math he does makes it within his reach, at least not right now. It never occurs to him to ask John about it; he couldn’t plan for their present, so Dean doesn’t even entertain the thought he planned for their future.

His dad seems happier now with his new family, and Dean feels more and more like an outsider as even he and Sam drift apart, like a live-in babysitter rather than a son and older brother. When he talks to Charlie about the odd nostalgia he feels watching Adam, remembering the time when Sam was just as helpless, she just leans into him and puts her head on his shoulder. 

"I don't think you realize what a singularly amazing person you are," she says, and when he sputters in response she elbows him in the ribs. "Shut up. Absorb praise."

It's on a day like any other when Kate asks Dean if he can babysit the boys on Saturday, and as he nods in easy agreement Sam raises his voice in protest.

"I'm almost fourteen, I'm too old to be babysat." 

"Your birthday is three weeks away, Sam, and it's up to your father whether you're old enough to need a babysitter, so you'll have to take it up with him."

Dean excuses himself to the bathroom, where he leans on the sink and takes several deep breaths to try and calm his racing heart. He looks into the mirror, staring into his own eyes, wondering how the time went by so fast.

Three weeks. In three weeks he has to spend the night in the goblin realm. With the king. With Castiel.

Unless Castiel has forgotten all about him. 

He wants to talk to Sam about it, get the confession off his chest, but he can’t bring himself to burden him with it, young as he still is. He considers telling Charlie because he's told her everything else, but he can’t even imagine how to explain in a way that will make her believe.

Three weeks.

Nothing to do but wait. Wait, and see.

Even so, a countdown begins inside his head, ticking off the days until he meets his fate.

***

Study hall is Dean's last period of the day, just after wood shop, and Mr. Singer lets him stay during his free period to make a birthday gift for Sam. He'll usually sit at his desk going over papers in silence while Dean works, his presence comforting rather than menacing. As his classmates wander out Dean gets right to it, sanding the piece down to get it ready to stain, letting his mind wander. It's not the type of thing that needs exceptional focus or concentration, so his thoughts drift to the goblin king as he drags the textured block along the grain, watching dust particles dancing up into shafts of afternoon sunlight coming through the high windows of the basement workshop. 

He's been at it for about thirty minutes when Mr. Singer clears his throat, a paper cup of coffee in one hand and a magazine in the other, and something occurs to Dean. 

"You know, I never thanked you before. For the cupcake, when it was my birthday." He hadn't known how, truth be told, and Mr. Singer had never mentioned it. 

"Just trying to butter you up, Winchester," he says with a wink, then turns serious, leaning against his desk and tossing the magazine on top of it. "I been meaning to ask you: what are your plans?" 

"Plans?" Dean blinks at him, looking down. "I told you, it's going to be a bookshelf for Sam."

"Boy, I know what you're making over there, do I look like an idiot?" Mr. Singer shakes his head, and Dean smiles underneath his facemask. "Wipe that grin off your face, I know it’s there.”

"Sorry, sorry," Dean says, grinning harder as he straightens up, tapping the sanding block against his boot to shake off the loose dust. "What were you asking?"

"Plans. For after graduation. Have you made any yet?"

"No," he says, pulling the mask off his face, glad to be free of his own hot, humid breath. "I mean, I've looked into things, but." He shrugs. He's sure Bobby knows more about Dean's history than he lets on, same as all the other teachers who've looked at his file. "No big plans in my future other than finding a job." 

Mr. Singer stares at him for a few minutes, working a splinter of wood in his mouth from one side to the other like it's a toothpick, considering whether or not he wants to say whatever's on his mind. Finally he sighs, sitting back heavily into his chair. 

"Could use an apprentice," he says. 

"Apprentice?" 

"Got a custom cabinetry shop, downtown. You don't think teaching high school kids pays enough for me to live the lifestyle I enjoy, do you?" Dean just shakes his head, dumbfounded. "Work's hard, but it pays well enough even to start out. Got a partner who's a pain in the ass, but I get the feeling you won't be bothered by him. We both need the help, so he'll have to get over himself eventually." He shrugs, casually looking at some papers on his desk. "Might not be a bad idea to learn a trade if you can't be bothered with more schooling."

"I would really like that, sir."

Mr. Singer nods, going back to his magazine. "We'll talk specifics after you get that finished."

***

"So it's almost time," Balthazar says as he fills himself another goblet of wine. 

"Time for what?"

"Don't play coy with me. I’ve seen your eager anticipation as the time gets nearer for you to bring that stupid boy here."

"Clearly you've been keeping track as well if you know this." Balthazar grins but doesn't give any other acknowledgement, and Castiel sighs. Normally Balthazar is a fickle creature, prone to forget anything that doesn't interest him, but unfortunately Castiel is not one of those things. "I don't want you to interfere."

"Would I do a thing like that?"

"Readily, and eagerly, if memory serves."

"Castiel," Balthazar says with a look of mock indignation, saying the syllables of his name as though each one had a period at the end. "I'm offended that you think I would do anything to interrupt what is no doubt a serious, in-depth interview with a human for your as yet unannounced cultural study of their species. I'm sure the work you're doing will someday pave the way for better relations between our worlds." He takes a long sip from his goblet, pretending to ignore Castiel's glare. 

"You are being ridiculous."

"Am I?"

"Why does this matter to you so much? You were sure I would grow bored after one night as I recall. Perhaps you should just let me have it, and maybe you’ll find there’s no cause for alarm."

Balthazar sighs, pushing himself up from the bench where he's been sprawled all night, coming to stand by Castiel on the balcony. 

"No, I don't believe that," he says quietly, leaning on the balustrade. "I know you too well, brother. You take a singular interest in things, and devote yourself to them with focused purpose. You also feel things very keenly, though you pretend otherwise."

"These are not bad traits."

"That depends on the situation. A human on the receiving end of your pointed interest may be frightened by it, rather than return it." Castiel clenches his jaw, staring into the distance. "If that happens it will affect you deeply."

"You say that as though you expect me to fall madly in love.” Castiel shakes his head with a wry grin. “Surely if I were the type to do so it would have happened before now. I’ve had numerous lovers to choose from over the last millenia, just as you have. We are not made for such emotion.”

Balthazar looks up at him before he stands straight with a sigh.

"I fear all this will end in tears, one way or another, and even if they're not yours, you will hate yourself for causing them."

***

The bookcase for Sam's birthday is set up in the room they share, polished and filled with books before he gets home from the library. Dean takes the old one apart carefully, even though it's only made of cheap particle board, something he'd found on a curb soon after they'd moved here. He finishes stacking the boards out back by the garbage cans right before Sam gets home, running into the house and pounding up the stairs without even acknowledging Dean, who just shakes his head. He looks through their scant movie collection as he waits for Sam to find his present, wondering what his pick will be tonight, when he comes barrelling back down the steps five minutes later in a different shirt.

"I'll see you later!" he says before rushing back out the front door. 

"Sam?" Dean calls after him, but the door has already shut behind him. He pulls back the curtain to see Sam running to a car waiting on the curb, getting into the back seat where another boy that looks vaguely familiar waits as a woman drives off with the two of them. "What the hell?" 

It's probably a boy from Sam's grade and his mother, so Dean doesn't panic. He has other feelings instead about the fact that Sam has forgotten their birthday tradition, and clearly didn't even notice his present. 

His father gets home a couple of hours later to a house smelling like macaroni and cheese. Sam's favorite. Dean had tried not to let his bitterness seep into the ingredients as he'd prepared it, letting his anger simmer while the cheese bubbled as he stared gloomily into the oven, watching it bake.

"Hey Dad," he says glumly. "Sam went off with a friend of his but he didn't tell me where or when he'd be home."

"Yeah," John says, tossing his keys onto the counter. "His friend Kevin's mother called to ask if she could take them to that new Bond movie, even though it's a school night, since it's Sammy's birthday and all."

"Oh." He's been feeling it for some time now, the fraying of their brotherly bond, but this is like the final snap of the fibers. Of course Sam would finally make friends at school, and Dean's glad for that, but he thought there would always be some things that were just theirs alone, some traditions that they'd keep forever. "That's nice."

John looks at him for a few minutes, then leans against the counter heavily. "Listen, Dean, there's been something I've been meaning to talk to you about." Dean waits, curious and confused. "You're graduating next month, and, well, you're eighteen now." He shifts uncomfortably, turning his back to get a beer out of the fridge before he continues. "You're old enough to shift for yourself now, and I know you've got the skills to do so."

It's the closest John's ever come to any kind of acknowledgement of everything that came between their mother's death and his marriage to Kate, but Dean has a feeling that's all he's going to get, so he doesn't press.

"Sure, Dad."

"Well, once graduation is over I think it's time you set out on your own. Get yourself a place to live, stop sharing a bedroom with your little brother. I might be able to find you a job..."

"I've already got a job lined up," Dean says quickly. He swallows over the lump in his throat. "Should be able to get a place of my own by the end of the summer."

John doesn’t ask questions, doesn’t praise Dean for already getting himself set up with a situation, doesn’t say he’ll miss him. He just smiles sadly, then claps Dean on the shoulder as he leaves the room, tipping the brown bottle into his mouth while he walks. Dean holds his breath until he hears the shower start running, then collapses into a chair at the table to put his head in his hands.

Thirty minutes later, when Kate has gotten home with Adam and John has come back downstairs for dinner, Dean has his game face back on. The food tastes like ashes in his mouth but he goes through all the motions, cleans up the table after dinner, then announces he has homework to do and excuses himself upstairs. 

He's not proud of the way he feigns sleep when Sam gets home and comes to bed, nor of the way he sulks silently when Sam's breathing evens out as he falls asleep, or the way he broods in the dark while his own slumber dances just out of reach. He listens to the night sounds outside his window, one in particular that seems out of place, like the hoot of an owl. He glances at the clock, nearing midnight, and finally remembers the thing that he's been dreading for the last few weeks. 

"Hello Dean," says a voice he'd nearly forgotten from the shadows in the corner of the room. "It's time."


	3. Chapter 3

Much like the first time they met, Dean finds himself transported out of his bedroom without knowing exactly how it happened. One minute he's getting out of bed to stand before the goblin king, freezing for a moment as Sam snorts in his sleep, then he blinks and opens his eyes somewhere else: a twilight forest crowded with fireflies, the light of them bright enough for him to discern the veined backbone of nearly every leaf, the varied shades of green between the moss and the brush and the leaves. He's still barefoot, the dark soil cool and dry between his toes as he moves through the trees in the sleep pants and threadbare t-shirt he'd gone to bed in. He plucks a nearby leaf, rubbing it between his fingers, tangible and real.

"Where are we?" he asks in wonder, forgetting that he should be afraid. "Are we inside the labyrinth?"

"Yes, and no," Castiel says, looking about him. "It exists within the labyrinth, but it's not part of it."

"Like the ballroom," Dean says without thinking, moving a little further away from Castiel's sudden proximity.

"Quite," Castiel replies, but Dean can't read the timber of his voice. "This way." 

Dean doesn't know how long they wander through the trees, but he doesn't feel threatened, though a part of his brain tells him he should; it's anticipation that thrums beneath his skin instead. He knows what it means, even if he still can’t bring himself to voice it, the way every cell in his body seems rapt with attention in Castiel’s presence.

They finally reach a clearing in the midst of the forest, and Dean moves into the wide open space in awe, staring at everything around him before turning his gaze to the goblin king.

"Do you like my sanctuary?" 

Castiel is spectacularly overdressed for a night-time visit to the great outdoors: billowy silk shirt with the laces loose at the throat and layered with a fitted vest, breeches clinging to his thighs, with leather boots hugging his calves so tightly that Dean is sure he needs to take them off with magic. He sits on the grass with one leg bent, the other extended, resting one arm on his knee, and Dean's gaze lingers on those long graceful fingers in their tight gloves as he gestures for him sit as well. Dean lowers himself to the grass but stretches out on his back, staring up at the pinprick of stars in the sky mixed with the yellow glow of a thousand fireflies. It’s easier to keep his eyes away.

"Yes," he finally offers, cautiously, deciding that honesty is the best policy. It's calming, from the cool breezes to the ambient light, the forest sounds all around them. “It's not exactly what I would have expected from you."

"Your expectations of me were quite exhausting, as I recall."

"I barely knew who you were, I hardly had any expectations. You were just some guy who burst into my house and kidnapped my baby brother."

"Dean, Dean, Dean," Castiel tuts from beside him. "You continue to operate under this delusion that I am some random boogeyman who shows up unannounced and steals children. There are guidelines for my work, and I operate within them."

"Is that so? Because it seemed to me as though you did a lot of coloring outside the lines, there."

"Is that a colloquial saying meant to suggest that I bent the rules?"

"Not a suggestion, more of an outright statement."

"Nonsense."

"If I had any expectations of you, it was that you weren't to be trusted."

"That was your only expectation? Did I not strike you as imposing?" There's a hint of humor in that voice, and it takes all Dean has to stay where he is, staring skyward with his hands behind his head. "A mystical being to be feared? It seems you at least thought I’d do harm to your person."

"What else was I supposed to expect from a stranger dressed in black that made an entrance like that?" Castiel laughs lowly, and Dean tries not to enjoy the sound even as his skin tingles. In the labyrinth so much sass would have led to trouble, but without worrying about Sam or Adam he feels free to be just as saucy as he likes, and Castiel seems disarmed by it. "You seem much different now than I remember. Is this how you are when you're off the clock or something?"

There's no answer for some time, and Dean finally turns on his side, resting on an elbow. 

"I do not understand what 'off the clock' means," Castiel says, a perplexed look on his face. "Are you referring to when I reordered time? I still have those powers, so how am I different?"

Dean actually laughs at this, falling onto his back again, any trepidation forgotten for the moment. "It means when you're not working."

"Working?"

"I realize this is a foreign concept for you, but in the real world humans have to work to earn money. Being on the clock means you're working, doing your job."

"I see. I do not have a job, except for being what I am. So I suppose I am always 'on the clock', as it were. But I do not understand why I seem different to you now."

"I guess it's because you're hardly imposing now, sitting in a meadow. With heeled boots on. _Heels_. We're in a forest." For a moment he freezes, wondering again if he's gone too far, but Castiel doesn't react. "You're not actively trying to hurt me, or my brothers, at the moment. That definitely makes you seem different."

"I see."

"Why am I here?" he blurts out, unable to hold back anymore. "Am I supposed to have sex with you?"

"Would you like to?" The answer is so calm, so matter of fact, that it catches Dean off guard.

"No!" he sputters, though he actually thinks _maybe_.

"I have no wish to force myself on someone unwilling."

_Unwilling isn’t the word, _Dean thinks, but shoves the idea away before he can give it too much thought.

"Then what do you want from me?"

"Oh, make no mistake Dean, what I _want _is to have you writhing beneath me." He turns his head to meet Dean's eyes, only inches from his own now. "But I'm not a monster. There's no pleasure in taking what I want by force. I’d much rather have you pliant, and willing." Dean inhales sharply, turning his head away. "So I will wait until that is something that you desire."

"And if I never desire it?"

Castiel shrugs.

"I doubt that very much, but until then...I have had very little interaction with humans, and I find you intriguing. I wish to know more about the world you live in. About you." 

"So that you can figure out how to seduce me? How do you know I even like dudes?" To be fair, Dean didn’t even know until becoming friends with Charlie, who freely points out that his sexuality seems to get very fluid when it comes to Han Solo; he’s just not ready to explore that aspect of himself for the first time with a mystical being that sees him as some kind of curious conquest. 

"I've never understood the human fixation on physical form. It seems so limiting. Perhaps that could be one of the things you explain to me about humans in general."

"I don't even know where to start," Dean admits. 

Castiel levels that gaze at him, like liquid blue fire scattered with sparks. "Start at the beginning."

Dean clears his throat, lying back on the grass and trying not to think about how warm parts of him are suddenly. "I was born in Kansas," he begins. "Sammy was born when I was four. Six months later our mother died in a house fire."

The story rolls off his tongue with practiced ease, even though the only person he's ever told is Charlie. All their lives they had traveled the same circuitous route eight or nine months of the year, following the carnival company their dad worked for. They’d come to town for whatever festival was in season, building a fairway from the ground up in an empty parking lot or an abandoned field, then break it down a week later and move on to the next town on the list. It was the only life Sam had ever known, but Dean vaguely remembered a different time: a time when he had cookies and played with toys rather than watching other kids win them, when he got tucked into bed at night and kissed on the forehead.

Now, John would put them into a nearby motel for a week or two, however long they were going to be in the area, and once Dean was old enough to be trusted with Sam's care -- ten, as far as John was concerned -- they would often be left alone. 

Dean always looked forward to the time when the carnival shut down for the winter, just because it meant they would get to stay in a single location and attend school, and Sam loved school; but then the season would start up again and they'd be back on the road, moving from place to place. Once Sam was old enough -- ten years old seemed to be an age that John Winchester considered a rite of passage -- they started working the carnival themselves. Sam was often helping out at one concession stand or another, while Dean learned charm from the variety of rogues who managed the game booths on the midway.

Dean had long ceased to dream of any other life but that one, only focusing on each day as it came. Haranguing his father for money to get things they desperately needed, like clothes for the ever-growing Sam or second-hand books so they could try and keep up with schooling on the road, so they wouldn't be completely lost when they found a different place to spend the winter. No two schools they went to were ever the same, but the one thing that never changed was the wide berth the other students always gave them, the new kids with their shabby clothes and battered backpacks. 

Castiel interrupts frequently with question after question, as though he finds Dean's terrible childhood fascinating, and there are so many things about humanity he doesn't understand that his queries seem almost childlike. He's not sure how much time passes as they lie in the meadow but Dean eventually relaxes, feeling the tension in his muscles release. He stops talking at some point when the stars above him begin to blur, blinking his eyes in confusion. The ground beneath him is pulling at his limbs, his body sinking into the earth below in a slow swirl, and as he finally closes his eyes he hears Castiel say one more thing.

"Until next time, Dean Winchester."

He wakes with a gasp, alone in his bed in the almost dark of pre-dawn, no other sound but the soft breathing of Sam on the opposite side of the room. He sits up, rubbing at his eyes, wondering if it was just a dream until he realizes he's holding something in one hand.

He opens his fingers on a single leaf. 

_Until next time, Dean Winchester._

He should feel threatened by that last comment, but there's an eager anticipation in him instead. He crawls out of bed as quietly as he can, reaching under the bed to pull out the cigar box, and places the leaf carefully inside.

***

"Dammit boy, where's your head at? It's not like you to be careless around a piece of equipment." Mr. Singer sounds more concerned than agitated, but his face is still bright red. Dean _did _catch himself before he put his hand in a position to sever some fingers, but it was a near thing.

"I'm sorry, sir. I had a bad night and barely slept. I know it's a poor excuse." Mr. Singer sighs, pushing off the battered baseball cap he usually wears and holding it with two fingers while he scratches his balding pate with the other three. 

"Sam not like his present?" he guesses, too low for the other students to hear over the sound of the equipment.

"More like didn't even notice it until this morning." 

Mr. Singer nods, like that must explain the restless night he had, and Dean is doing nothing to change his mind about it. "Yeah. It's tough when you work really hard on something and it isn't fully appreciated."

"Yeah, well. He was only home for five minutes before he ran back out with his friend, so." Dean shrugs, as though it doesn't matter, as though it doesn't hurt as much as his hand would have if he'd placed it two inches to the right. "He noticed this morning, made sure to thank me, says he loves it. So it was a success in the end."

Mr. Singer looks at him carefully. "Maybe you should just sweep up after everybody until the bell rings. You're not in any shape to use the tools today." Dean can't argue the point, so he just nods. "Stick around after class though."

He swallows as Mr. Singer wheels away, and it has nothing to do with the sawdust in the air. He ignores Gordon Walker, who wolf-whistles when Dean bends over by his station, earning a barked reprimand from the front of the room. The last fifteen minutes of class seem interminable, but he keeps his head down and dutifully sweeps dirt and wood shavings into piles, then transfers the piles into a dustpan. The bell rings after he’s emptied it for the fourth time, and he brushes himself off before he takes a seat before Mr. Singer’s desk, braced for a lecture.

"You still want to come work for me after graduation?"

"What? I mean, you still want me to after..." He gestures to the worktable where he nearly sawed his hand off twenty minutes ago. 

"Kid, that's the first bad day I've seen you have all year, and that's a remarkable thing when you're a high school teacher. Some kids don't even have that many _good _days." He eyes Dean suspiciously. "Anything else happen to keep you up last night?"

_I had a date with the goblin king_.

"My dad, he, uh. He told me I should find another place to live, once school's out. Says I'm eighteen now and should take care of myself." He tries not to look as ashamed as he feels, and he can't tell if he's pulling it off from the look on Mr. Singer's face. The man's eyes narrow, then he nods his head, as though he's answered a question he asked himself. 

"Got a room above the shop you can stay in if it suits you. Ain't nothing fancy, just an efficiency apartment, but it comes with the apprenticeship. So"-- he pulls a manila folder out of the top drawer of his desk -- "I've got the paperwork here for you to read over, with all the details and whatnot. You can have your old man go over it if you want his opinion, although since he seems to think you can take care of yourself, I warrant his opinion isn't necessary."

"That's great." Taking the folder brings with it a rush of relief, as though most of the things he thought were falling apart have suddenly dropped into place in a new and better arrangement. "I'll have a definite answer for you by the end of the week." He already knows he's going to say yes, but not because he has to. He wants this job, he wants to get out on his own, even if he doesn't like the way it's happening. "Thanks, Mr. Singer."

"Rufus will never shut up about it if he hears you calling me that. He'll insist you address him as Lord Turner or some shit. You might as well get used to calling me Bobby."

"Thanks Bobby," he says with a grin. 

"Get out of here, ya idjit," the man says gruffly, trying to hide his own smile, and Dean leaves the room to go wait for Charlie.

***

"Please tell me that's not what you're wearing." 

Castiel looks over his shoulder, then turns around to lean his elbows on the balustrade, assessing Balthazar’s navy velvet from head to toe, broken only by a puff of cream-colored lace at his throat and the jut of his chin beneath the elaborate mask he wears. 

"I'm glad you chose a dark color for such form fitting trousers," he comments wryly.

"Goodness, does it obscure all my charms?" Balthazar looks down on himself in mock horror. "I should have chosen the grey. How else will anyone know I am worthy of their attention?" He looks at the plain breeches and loose tunic Castiel wears. "I could always go home and change, since you're not even dressed yet."

Castiel sighs, running a hand through his hair. "I think I'll stay here."

"No," Balthazar says slowly. "You haven't left the castle since the night you spent with that wretched human. I won't leave you here brooding any longer when there's revelry to be had."

"I am not brooding."

"Oh, of course not, how silly of me. Clearly you are working to perfect your stare of contemptible loathing by turning it on the unsuspecting populace from the balcony, night after night after night." Castiel turns to look at him, and Balthazar snaps his fingers. "That's the one. Truly, it's marvelous just the way it is. Practice makes perfect, I suppose."

"Why are you still here?"

"So you're saying I should definitely go home and change into the grey while you make yourself presentable?"

"Can't you just leave me be?"

"No, Castiel, I cannot." Balthazar shakes his head, the plumage adorning his mask fluttering as he does. "This is the very thing I was afraid of. I was hoping after you'd shagged the human senseless you would get your own back."

"I did nothing of the sort."

"Ah, well, that explains the _mood_. As I see it, the only way to combat that is to put on your finery and come to the ball, where we shall eat and drink and dance and be merry. As we do."

"Yes. As we always do. Just the same, each and every time. It's boring."

"You're saying that standing on your balcony in this disheveled state is far more scintillating?"

"I'm saying it requires far less effort for equal reward. Whether I stay here or go to the masquerade, the outcome is predictable."

"Yes, but there's _gossip _at the ball, and if you don't want to be the subject of it you need to dress yourself and make an effort. Otherwise, all the talk will be about how Castiel has fallen under the thrall of a mere human. Which will lead to speculation about said human, and there's nothing like curiosity to bring out the worst in our kind. Before you know it they'll be competing with one another to find out who it is, merely for the chance to seduce him away from you for sport." He pauses when Castiel's shoulders tense and his fists clench. "You know I'm right."

Castiel sighs. "I don't like it, but you are." He pinches the bridge of his nose. "What should I wear?"

Balthazar strides to the wardrobe, throwing it open dramatically. "Let's see, shall we?" He begins tossing articles of clothing on the bed, and Castiel finally drags himself off the balcony. 

"Do you really think the others would harm Dean, if they found out about him?"

"Not on purpose, perhaps, but he would be hurt all the same." Balthazar peruses the vast selection of gloves, choosing a pair in ivory. "As you pointed out yourself, our lives here are repetitive, boring. It's not like the old days anymore, when we could entertain ourselves easily among humankind, when they believed in us, knew the rules of interaction. Anything outside the norm is enticing, as I assume Dean's life is for you. Which is why I hoped a single night would be enough for you to...work it out of your system."

"I suppose that's what it was at first."

"But not now?"

Castiel says nothing as he begrudgingly changes clothing, not even arguing with anything Balthazar has chosen, not caring how he looks. 

Their arrival causes a stir among the crowd, as does every new entrance, and Castiel follows in Balthazar's shadow as he makes his way to a table of spirits. He pours generously for the both of them, pressing the first of many goblets into Castiel's hand as they watch the revelers swirl around the room in a sickening mix of colors. Balthazar is vibrant and engaging with everyone who passes by, and Castiel practices a charming aloofness that has always served him well in the past. 

It occurs to him, with no shortage of irony, that he's actually wearing two masks tonight, and he thinks one of those he's worn for quite some time.

"I heard you have a new pet," Rachel says with a simpering look from his left as they dine, and Castiel suppresses the urge to stab her with his fork by taking up his goblet instead, draining it and holding it up in a bored manner while he waits for it to be filled. 

"A pet is something you keep and care for, as I understand it, so I can assure you I do not." 

"Really? I heard new humans were in your realm some time ago, and one of them took a shine to you." 

"I hope you didn't pay Crowley with anything too dear for that information," he says, noting the way her lips tighten as he sips his wine with a casual air. "They simply did not wish me to keep the child they’d given me after all, and so they ran the labyrinth to secure his return." 

"How exciting," Rachel says, voice devoid of anything even close to excitement. Castiel gives an indifferent shrug. 

"Not particularly. It seems the challenge isn't as hard as I expected, as they were able to reach the end and leave with their family intact." On the other side of the table, Balthazar catches his eye, briefly, and Castiel tilts his head in acknowledgement. "Since then I've been giving serious consideration to the maze's design."

"I suppose that's why you spend so much time there, shunning all of us. It’s not fair that none of us may enter." Her words are a challenge, though her tone seems playful. 

"I cannot have any of you tampering with the integrity of my design, can I? Especially not one as given to mischief as you are, or with so deep a purse with which to pay for information." The diners in the immediate vicinity fall silent, staring at the two of them as Rachel wilts under his stare, until Balthazar starts laughing.

"You can hardly blame her for giving in to the temptation of forbidden fruit, brother." He winks at Castiel before turning his attention to Rachel, and those flanking him smirk. "I can assure you, just from listening to him talk, that the entire thing is exceedingly boring. I only forbear because his wine cellar is massive, and he’s obligated to keep me well-stocked." He raises his goblet with a flourish, and their companions all giggle as they raise their own. "To Castiel. May he finish his improvements long before another human deigns to test them, since it only took, oh, what, a thousand years for the first one?"

Castiel rolls his eyes as he raises his own glass, feeling relief at Balthazar's misdirection coating his throat with the wine. 

Much later, Balthazar comes to stand beside Castiel where he leans against the wall, limbs loose and relaxed with an overabundance of drink. "I've just spent the last two dances complaining to sweet Rachel about how the very sound of your voice droning on about improvements is enough to put me to sleep, and if I never hear about another oubliette in my life it will be far too soon."

"That was clever of you at dinner. Thank you." 

"Don't thank me. I have a price."

He rolls his neck, giving Balthazar a searching look. "What is that?"

"I want you to give up your dalliance, whatever it is, with this human."

"Ask for anything else. That, I cannot give you."

Balthazar sighs, plucking a goblet from a passing tray. "I thought as much. Then you'll need to supply me with something other than wine. What sort of spirits do the humans enjoy?" 

"I'll make enquiries." 

"Then I'll cover for you as long as I get something out of it."

"How very noble of you."

Castiel turns back to the dancers, feeling out of place among them, even in his own skin, and wonders if he'll ever be able to pull the veil back down. 

***

A couple weeks before the end of school, Dean goes downtown to Bobby's shop to fill out some paperwork and check out the apartment. Charlie tags along and gives the tiny dwelling two thumbs up when she sees it has cable and ethernet hookups. It's sparsely furnished, but since Dean doesn't have any to begin with he's ecstatic at what he finds, including an old but functional color TV.

He meets Bobby's business partner, Rufus, who seems as much a pain in the ass as warned about. Years of carnival work have helped Dean hone the skills to deal with difficult folks with a smile, and he gets a begrudging handshake and a grunt when he leaves that he considers a win.

"I can't believe your dad asked you to move out after graduation, and my dad is already freaking out about me leaving for school two months from now," Charlie says over burgers and fries. "Aren't you scared to be out on your own?" He just raises his eyebrows at her. "Right. Dumb question." 

"I've never had only myself to take care of before. Ever since I can remember, it's been my job to keep an eye on Sam, take care of him. You know, we've never even slept in different rooms?" He shakes his head. "I don't know that I've ever had any privacy before."

"Oh my god, you're just going to spend the first week in your new place masturbating, aren't you?" He throws some fries at her head but doesn't answer, and she laughs. "You are so busted. I bet the first thing you buy yourself is an old computer so you can watch porn."

"_And_ so I can email you."

"Ew, please make sure you wash your hands before you send me messages from your pornputer."

Charlie graduates with honors but not as valedictorian, because "only a loser would take on a speech writing assignment when they've finished all their other schoolwork." He wishes he could sit next to her during convocation, but they go in alphabetical order and he's stuck with that asshole Gordon for two hours, who keeps pressing his thigh up against Dean at every opportunity. 

His dad skips the ceremony, claiming he can't get out of work, but Sam and Kate are there to cheer from the bleachers. He can see Adam, sitting on Kate's lap, clapping his hands with glee even though he has no idea what all the excitement is about. The ceremony seems to take forever, but when it's finally done and Dean holds his diploma it feels like he's climbed a mountain. 

Kate drops them off at home before she heads to her evening shift with Adam dozing in his carseat, even though Dean offers to keep him for the night

"Don't be silly. You've got the night to yourself, you should go have fun," she says, patting his hand where it rests on the doorframe before she backs out of the driveway. He doesn't know how to tell her his graduation plans involve going to Charlie's house to play video games, which he does on regular days that end in y.

His spirits lift when he and Sam enter the kitchen to find a cake waiting for him on the counter, _Congrats Dean! _written in a sloppy script across the top with an envelope propped up against the serving plate.

"She tried really hard to make it neat, but she said she's never written on a cake before."

"It's amazing," Dean says, his throat thick, and he opens the card with numb hands. A fifty dollar bill falls out, and much neater handwriting on the inside flap says _Don't tell your father! _with a little happy face next to it. "Shit. She didn't have to do that."

"She said you'd say that, and my job was to tell you to 'hush and have some cake' as long as we eat it here in the kitchen and not the living room."

"Well, then. You cut while I go get out of this robe and put the card away."

He tucks the card, money still inside, into the cigar box of keepsakes under his bed. By the time he comes back downstairs John has gotten home from work, and he and Sam are both eating cake at the kitchen table, with a huge slice waiting for Dean. Sam looks like he's practically vibrating in his seat, and Dean shakes his head as he sits in front of his father.

"How'd it go?"

"Boring," Dean answers, stabbing the cake with his fork. "Takes forever to get to the W's."

"Yeah," John grins. "That part always sucked for me, too." He clears his throat, looking down at his plate as if embarrassed. "I, uh, got you a graduation gift."

"You did?" He looks at Sam, who's bobbing his head up and down with unbridled enthusiasm. "I wasn't expecting you to."

"It's, uh, it's not new, but I hope you like it anyway." 

"Dad."

"Lift up your plate."

His brow furrows with confusion, but he does as requested. There are two identical silver keys, each stamped with a square containing the block letters _GM._

"You bought me a _car_?" He's completely dumbstruck at this stroke of generosity from John Winchester, who thought buying new shoes was unnecessary when you had duct tape.

"Not exactly." He pulls a piece of paper out of his back pocket, sliding it across the table, and Dean nearly sobs when he looks at it.

"You're giving me the Impala," he whispers in disbelief. 

"Plenty of loaners for me to use at the shop." He looks down at the table. "You know, I bought that car to impress your mother, when we first started dating." He shrugs in a way that conveys a lot of meaning, at least to Dean, who's spent his whole life trying to glean the merest hint of affection from anything his father said and did.

"I'll take good care of her," Dean says solemnly. 

"Yeah, I know." John presses away from the table, patting Dean on the shoulder as he walks out of the kitchen. 

Two days later, he packs the battered olive green duffel bag that has been under his bed since John brought them here eighteen months ago. Outside of his clothing, which fits entirely into a single kitchen garbage bag, all of his worldly possessions still fit into the duffel. There's even enough room left to fit the single book that he takes from Sam's shelf, turning it over in his hands thoughtfully before he opens it, paging carefully to the right spot. 

He pulls his cigar box of keepsakes out from under the bed, wiping the dust from its surface before he opens the lid, moving around the sparse contents until he finds what he’s looking for: a single leaf, green and vibrant as though he’d just plucked it this morning. He rubs it between his fingers, unsurprised, then carefully places it on the page before closing the book firmly. The book and the box are the last items he places into his duffel bag, zipping it closed with a sense of finality.

Packing has hardly made his side of the room any more sparse. The stripped down mattress is really the only noticeable difference, the one sign that someone no longer inhabits this half of the space. He sits on the bare bed, letting his eyes trail over Sam’s domain for the last time: sneakers half-hidden by a pair of crumpled jeans in the middle of the floor, the sheets of the unmade bed hanging off one side of the mattress, pillows askew, a book peeking out from underneath one of them. 

“Hey,” says a tentative voice from the doorway, and Dean looks up at Sam leaning against the frame, seeming smaller than he is under his tumble of shaggy hair. “I guess you’re all packed.” He enters the room slowly, sitting next to Dean on the bed, clutching the edge of the mattress like he might fall off.

“So, what are you gonna do with your very own room?” Dean asks cheerfully, even as his heart clenches. “You can have sleepovers now without your creepy older brother here.”

“That’s not…” Sam starts, clenching his jaw as he trails off. “I don’t know why you’re even moving out.”

Dean hesitates with the truth on the tip of his tongue, then swallows it. Sam will have to live here for at least the next four years, and his resentment of John is already a blunt instrument looking for a whetstone to hone it into something sharper.

“Come on, Sam, I can’t live at home forever.”

“You just want to live alone so you can bring home girls and do things to them, don’t you?”

_Not just girls_, Dean thinks before he can help himself, and yeah, not going to unpack that with his little brother.

“That is definitely a perk, not gonna lie.”

“I can’t believe you’re leaving me alone with Dad so you can get laid whenever you want.”

“I’m moving downtown, Sam, not to Alaska, it’s not like I’m abandoning you in the wilderness with no one but Dad for company.” Sam crosses his arms, sulking with all his teenage might, and Dean sighs. “Look, things are pretty good here. Kate takes care of you, and Adam adores you. I’m trusting you to look after him while I’m not here.”

“We’re supposed to be a team,” Sam says petulantly. “Team Big Brothers. You said so.”

“That won’t change just because my address does.” He hooks an arm around Sam’s shoulders, pulling him close, pressing his face into his hair like he used to do when he was just a baby, small enough to cling to Dean when he was scared. He feels Sam nod, and he lets out a relieved breath. “I’ve got to go.”

“Fine,” Sam says, pulling away and launching himself out of the room, feet pounding down the stairs. He hears the slam of a door and sighs, gathering up his duffel and his garbage bag and taking them out to the Impala. John shakes his hand, pulling him in to clap him on the back, but neither says anything before Dean drives away, throat thick and heart heavy.


	4. Chapter 4

It's late when Dean gets home from Sam's birthday dinner, so it’s very dark as he enters the back of the shop and ascends the stairs to the second floor. He doesn't hit the lightswitch even though he's balancing a small plate wrapped in plastic with a generous piece of extra cake on it, pressed into his hands by Kate as he left the house. He prefers pie, but only a fool refuses free cake, and he'd thanked her warmly before he left. 

Sam is fifteen now, and growing like a weed. It's a shock to Dean's system each time he sees him, and he wonders if Sam is actually growing faster or if it just feels that way because Dean doesn't have the luxury of adjusting to it slowly. He sighs as he crosses the storage area to his room, regret at not being part of Sam's day to day life warring with the freedom he enjoys now that he’s out on his own. 

The past year has been a revelation, and Dean feels a sense of purpose and accomplishment he'd never experienced during their transient years. His future had always been a question mark, something not to spend too much time on because he'd been busy just getting by, and then when they'd finally stopped he'd only felt out of place, extraneous to his father's new life. 

These are the thoughts occupying his mind as he lets himself into the small apartment he calls home, leaving him unprepared for his visitor.

"Hello, Dean."

"Jesus!" He fumbles the plate of cake but manages not to drop it, though he's pretty sure it gets squashed in the process. 

"No, actually," says a smug voice. "I did not expect you to forget my name after merely a year."

"Castiel," he gets out, holding a hand to his racing heart as he drops the deformed cake and his car keys onto the tiny counter of his kitchenette. "I didn't expect you."

"No? As I recall we have a recurring appointment." 

"Of course, it's just..."

He can barely make out Castiel's outline as he sits in the shadows, but he can see as he tilts his head. "Did you think I'd grown bored with you already?" Dean shrugs, and Castiel makes a tutting noise. "You think yourself unworthy of my attention?"

"I guess I'm just wondering how you found me."

"Don't be foolish." Castiel holds out a hand, and Dean takes it without thinking. He's no more than blinked before he finds himself standing in a strange place, with a waterfall in shades of cyan and lavender. The water is full of a phosphorescence that gives it an eerie glow, illuminating the area around it. Castiel leads Dean to sit at the edge of the pool, a misting spray caressing their skin as the river tumbles over the cliff face, the sound of it hitting the bottom like soft chimes instead of crashing. 

"This is beautiful," Dean says, awestruck, craning his head back to look upwards before he turns to Castiel with a grin.

The goblin king is, once again, wearing something out of a teenager's romantic fantasy: ruffled poet shirt with the laces loose at the throat, tight fitting breeches with knee-high boots. Looking at him lying on the grass Dean feels the strongest urge to roll on top of him, to let their legs tangle and their bodies press together. He closes his eyes for a moment, trying to collect his thoughts. _It’s only one night a year,_ he reminds himself. _One night not to act on impulse or give in to temptation. _

Dean takes a ragged breath, staring into the pool instead. "You know, if you'd just offered to make landscapes like this for me in the beginning I might have let you keep Sam and Adam." 

"Had I known you were so easy to please I would have led with this. My brother tells me often that I do everything the hard way."

"I didn't know you had a brother."

"He's a thorn in my side most of the time, and I pretend he doesn't exist. Do you not feel that way about your own brothers?"

Dean laughs, shaking his head. "Sometimes. Sam won't stop talking about all the stuff he's learning in school, and Adam won't stop talking because he's learning to form sentences, and it all sounds like gibberish to me no matter which one it is.”

"You could have just let me keep them. Or the baby at least." 

"What kind of monster lets someone kidnap a little baby?" 

Castiel clenches his hands into fists, and Dean can hear the leather of his gloves creaking against the strain. 

"You should ask your own kind," he replies, "given how many of them have done just that."

"I'm sorry," Dean says quickly, and those fists relax a little. "Why do you do it?"

"Take a child from a place where it clearly isn't wanted?" Castiel spits it out, looking more bruised by this conversation than Dean had thought possible. "Why shouldn't I?"

"What happens to them?"

"They live in my realm under my care. That's what the place is _for._"

"Wait, so all of the goblins were once human children?"

"Of course. Why do you think they all act so childish?"

"That's terrible."

"Is it? They're removed from a poor environment and brought to a realm designed just for them. They live simple, uncomplicated lives, and are happy in their own way. How is that more terrible than growing up unwanted and unloved?” It hits closer to home than Dean likes. "There was a time, millennia ago, when there was no goblin realm, let alone a goblin king," Castiel muses, wrapping his arms around his raised knees. "The first child brought into the fae realm had been abandoned by his mother in the forest, at the edge of a ring of mushrooms."

"Like a fairy ring or something?" 

"Exactly so. His mother was right to suspect it was a magic place, and a fairy brought the child into our realm to raise as its own. The baby was imbued with magic, essentially turned into one of the fae, and eventually had no recollection of the humanity he'd been born with."

"That sounds sad."

"Does it? A child was plucked from a certain slow death and given magical powers, and that's sad to you?"

"Okay," Dean laughs. "Point taken."

"Humans reproduce at a much faster rate than we do, though not for lack of trying." There's a crooked smile on Castiel's face, and Dean wonders how much practice of his own Castiel has, but he continues before Dean can embarrass himself by asking. "Soon there were so many abandoned children that a separate portion of the realm was carved out for them, and I was chosen to rule it."

“How long ago was that?”

“Long before your father’s father was ever born. Centuries.”

"But that's impossible," Dean whispers. 

Castiel shifts slightly, extending both legs before him to lean back on his hands, and Dean's eyes are drawn to the muscles in his thigh flexing as he crosses his ankles. For a moment Dean cannot breathe, watching as Castiel drops his gaze to Dean’s lips, just for a moment, before their eyes meet again. Every illicit thought he’s had over the past year seems to be rushing through his brain at once, vying for attention.

"Why me?" he blurts out, and Castiel tilts his head, squinting. "I mean...with all that you've seen in your lifetime, why are you so fascinated with me?" He squirms under that steady gaze. “You make me feel like an insect under glass, something you’re just studying to better understand the human race.”

“I am.” 

“But why _me_?” He can’t hide the exasperation in his own voice, his desperation to understand.

“Why _not _you?” Castiel finally says, his voice deepening in a way that makes Dean shiver. “You don’t think you deserve to be admired?”

“There’s nothing interesting about me,” he whispers. “I haven’t seen the things you have.”

"But that means there's so much I can show you," Castiel says with a crooked smile, eyes twinkling with mischief, and Dean can feel sweat breaking out on his upper lip. 

"I thought you were the one who wanted to learn things, not me." His voice quavers and Castiel's eyes narrow, and he thinks desperately of any way to change the subject to less dangerous ground. "Speaking of learning, how did you know where I live now?" Castiel looks away, shifting uncomfortably. "Have you been watching me?" 

"Not always." Castiel has the good grace to at least look guilty. 

Dean breathes loudly through his nose, clenching his teeth so as not to knock out those of the powerful being sitting beside him, who could probably send Dean right back into the oubliette with a single thought. 

"I gave you one night every year for Sam and Adam's freedom," he says tightly. "I did not relinquish anything else to you, and I never will if I feel you can't be trusted." He never plans to in any case, but Castiel doesn't need to know that, and right now Dean doesn't feel the least bit guilty dangling that temptation in front of him in return for his privacy. 

"I'm sorry," Castiel says, and he actually sounds contrite. An awkward silence descends while Dean wonders what, exactly, Castiel may have been observing. 

"What was the last thing you watched?"

Castiel sighs. "This evening, you were with your family. It looked like a celebration."

"Sam's birthday," Dean confirms.

"You looked both happy and sad to be with them. May I ask why?"

Dean considers, mulling it over before he answers. "I used to dream about having a family life like they do in the movies." 

"Movies?" 

"Yeah, um. A story told with pictures that move. They can be really fantastic, like this place is, far removed from the real world. Or they can be stylized versions of the lives we want to lead, a kind of wish fulfillment."

"Those are the kind you like?"

"I used to. I used to wish that my mom was alive, that we all still lived in a house, eating dinner together at the table and talking about our days. I thought that's all it took to be a family." 

The entire family sat around the table in near silence during dinner, only talking to one another if they needed something they couldn’t reach. Sam read a book as Adam was fed by Kate, and John never glanced up from his plate except to look at his new family and smile. Dean, seated between his father and Sam, spent the whole night wondering why he kept spending time with people who seemed to have forgotten that he existed. It was an exercise of habit instead of actual desire for interaction.

"So it's not like the movies?"

"No. Not like the movies at all."

"Why do you not live there any longer?"

"Didn't watch enough to observe that?"

"I have not been spying on every facet of your life. I merely checked on you occasionally."

Dean shakes his head. "Dad told me I should move out of the house when I graduated from school, since I was eighteen and could shift for myself."

"This is a significant age for humans?"

"Kind of a milestone event. It's when you're recognized as an adult. Do they have that where you come from?"

"I was considered an adult when I turned four hundred." 

"Right. So. Similar, then." Castiel squints at him, and Dean just shakes his head with a laugh. "Anyway. I found a job and moved out almost a year ago."

"You seem resigned to the situation, but unhappy about it."

"I never really felt at home there, even though Kate was always kind to me, and I love Adam. It's just, well, my dad has been distant for a long time, and..." Dean takes a shuddering breath, turning to meet Castiel's eyes. "Sam's been pulling away from me ever since we ran the labyrinth. Like being around me reminds him of something he wishes he could forget."

Castiel gives him a pensive look, then turns away. "I could make him forget, if you wish," he says hesitantly. "I could make you both forget. You would only remember during the time you spent here with..."

"No," Dean says quickly, and Castiel opens his eyes in shock. "No more manipulation, Castiel. At least, not beyond transportation to stunning places. I've seen a lot of weird things on earth, but nothing like this."

He tells Castiel more stories of their travels, of weird monuments he and Sam have been to, of the predictable behavior of certain kinds of people, and it's not without regret that Castiel finally returns him home. Dean collapses onto his bed fully dressed, already asleep as dawn breaks over the horizon.

***

Castiel finds Dean sitting in a chair in the corner of his tiny apartment the following year. He’s reading by lamplight, and doesn't look up when Castiel materializes in the room, nor when he comes closer to peer at the book in Dean’s hands.

"_Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire," _he reads aloud from the cover, and Dean jolts. "That seems like a very strange title."

"We're going to have to put a bell on you, Jesus." 

"I think we established a year ago that that was my not my name." Castiel smirks as Dean gives him a look. He holds out a hand, and though Dean hesitates again before he takes it, it happens a little more quickly than the year before. By only three seconds, but Castiel can warp time to watch stars collapse in the span of a mere moment, and so he considers it a small triumph.

Dean gasps aloud when they arrive under a sky filled with pulsating light, like a multi-colored aurora borealis, collapsing onto the grass to lean back on his elbows. Castiel watches the play of light over his features, purple and yellow and green, before stretching out on the grass beside him.

"This is just what I needed," Dean says. "It's been a rough couple of months, which I suspect you already know." He looks at Castiel sideways.

"I do not spend all my waking hours watching your every move."

"So you still watch me sometimes?" Dean queries, and Castiel doesn't meet his eyes. "I thought so. How long ago?" 

"Not for many months now," Castiel admits, shoulders slumped in defeat. "It was a celebration, and it looked very interesting. There was a tree inside of the house, covered in lights and trinkets."

"Christmas," Dean sighs. "That's good." He runs a hand over his face. "I hated the idea that you were witnessing my humiliation earlier tonight."

"What happened?"

"I got dumped last week by the girl I'd been dating," Dean says casually, and Castiel is surprised to feel a lick of jealousy flare up in his gut. "No big deal, it wasn't serious, but I forgot that I was supposed to bring her to Sam's birthday dinner so she could meet the family. It made for a very awkward meal when Kate asked what time she was supposed to arrive. Sam enjoyed his bonus gift of teasing me about it all night."

Castiel briefly entertains several fantasies, all of which involve causing other humans pain. "What reason did she give for this separation?" he finally asks, curious how anyone could choose to not spend time with Dean on purpose. 

"It seems I’m not much of a catch."

"Is it your sexual prowess that needs improvement? As I've stated before, there is a great deal I can teach you, as soon as you're willing."

Dean takes a shuddering breath, turning to meet Castiel's eyes just as the sky above turns pink. "Is that all you think about?"

"Of course not. I'm not always in your presence."

"And now that you are?"

Castiel's eyes rove over his body, tense now in its repose, but not in fear. More like a coiled spring, waiting to be pounced upon, and Castiel meets his gaze again without guile. "Most definitely." 

"I would have thought you'd be bored of me by now," Dean says huskily. "Doesn't familiarity breed contempt?" 

"I'm not..._familiar..._with you yet." 

"No one talks to me the way you do."

"How so?"

"Like you find me intoxicating." 

"Oh, but I do," Castiel says, leaning closer, noting the way that Dean's eyes drop to his lips and back again. "I wish you'd let me show you just how much."

"I can't," Dean whispers, but his face is full of confusion, like he's no longer sure why. As though he's not burning with the same curiosity that Castiel feels like a living flame. He wonders if this is what it's like for humans when they encounter the fae: speechless with wonder, longing to touch, bespelled by the sight before them. 

Dean drops flat on his back as Castiel rolls to brace his arms on either side of him, holding himself taut with just a few scant inches between their bodies. "Can't," he asks meaningfully, bringing them close enough to feel the heat from each other's skin, Dean's ragged breath warm on his face. "Or won't?"

Dean swallows, closing his eyes as though to give himself strength. "I won't. You have no power over me, Castiel."

The spell is broken, and Castiel rolls away to turn his face back up to the dream sky, wondering what is happening to him. He's rarely been refused, but rejection has never stung him before. "I don't know why you deny something you so clearly want," he says petulantly. 

"I don't." Everything in Dean's body language tells Castiel that this is a lie. His heart rate is elevated, his breathing ragged, and there's a noticeable bulge in his pants -- but the anger in his voice belies all of that. "I don't want any of this. I'm not here by choice."

"Might I remind you that you _are_? You begged me to give you another option, practically offered yourself on a silver platter, and now you want to pretend you had no choice?”

“It was a sacrifice.”

“A sacrifice is still a choice, you fool boy.”

Dean sits up to glare at him, purple and green sky doing nothing to soften the anger on his face. “Fine, then it was only a choice between the lesser of two evils: lifelong imprisonment in the goblin realm for my brothers, or yearly visits with my adult imaginary friend."

Castiel clenches his jaw, staring firmly at the sky. "If you think I will release you from your contract because you hurl insults at me, you are mistaken."

"And you would release me from it I let you use my body instead?"

"No, but it would make our time together more pleasurable."

Dean shakes his head. "You are impossible."

"You are the one choosing to forgo something we would both enjoy. How am I impossible when you are the one making things difficult?"

"Get used to it," Dean says icily. "If you insist on my company year after year, this is what it will be like. We can talk to pass the time, pretend to be buddies, and I'll answer all the questions you have about humanity to the best of my ability; but I will never, ever, consent to fuck you."

"How crude," Castiel sneers in return. "If that's all you're capable of doing, it's no wonder you don't enjoy it."

"Oh, I enjoy it. Often, with females, and definitely with anyone who's not you, so I'll be sure to rub it in your face every year that you bring me here."

"I can't wait to be astounded by your inadequate sexual conquests."

"At least I don't have to trick anyone into spending the night, hoping to get lucky."

"Well, I had to branch out _somehow_. I've already slept with most of the fae, and goblins don't appeal." Dean opens his mouth to retort, but his anger simply cracks and he collapses into peals of laughter. "I fail to see what's so amusing. Goblins act like the children they once were, as I said, so the idea of sexual congress with any of them is simply distasteful.” Dean is doubled over, arms crossed over his torso as he tries to calm himself. “You’ve met Crowley, and his demeanor is simply unpleasant, so that rules him out." Dean's breathing through the last of his outburst now, wiping the corners of his eyes with a huge grin, then playfully poking Castiel in the shoulder. 

"We should fight more often. It's entertaining."

Castiel grips his arm, frowning, and Dean shakes his head with mirth. 

"I fail to see what's so funny."

"Oh Cas," Dean says, and Castiel frowns harder at the shortened version of his name. "You're right, my meager 'sexual conquests' will certainly be no match against someone who's slept with _most of the fae_." He collapses into delighted giggles all over again. 

"Would you like me discuss them in alphabetical order or by preference?" Dean goes completely silent, mouth agape, and Castiel smirks at how easily the tables have turned. "Or perhaps chronologically?"

"Gee, how can I resist the urge to be just another name on this exceptionally long list? It's all I ever wanted."

"I'm sure I would remember you much more fondly than anyone else you've ever been with, and for much longer."

"Well, you're probably not wrong about that part," Dean agrees sadly. "I haven't heard from Rhonda at all since we broke up, not once. Every other girl I've ever been with was a fleeting encounter, meeting up once or twice while the carnival was in town, and I sure never heard from any of them ever again."

"I'm sorry," Castiel says, surprised to find he means it. 

"Yeah." Dean shrugs dismissively. "It's not like I was really trying to pursue anything with most of them, knowing how we lived. Even in high school there was only the occasional hookup. Charlie's the only girl I have a successful relationship with and we're just friends."

"Is that what you want?"

"What, a relationship?" Castiel nods. "I don’t know. I mean, I see how much happier my dad is since he settled down with Kate, the way she stabilizes him. I think he lost himself, after my mom died. I always thought I'd never want to end up like that, grieving someone that way."

"What happened to your mother was a tragedy. That doesn't mean it will happen to you."

The sky erupts into waves of blue light, and Castiel finds himself transfixed at the play of emotions at war on Dean's face. "I guess I've never had anything in my life that wasn't temporary, or transient. That's what I want. Something with foundation. Something real."

Castiel turns away, staring up at the brilliant illusion of his own making, overcome with something he hasn't felt since he was a child: inadequacy.

***

Castiel long ago ceased to have any real concept of time, but now he marks it regularly, counting down until he can see Dean again. He tries to stop conjuring crystals to slake his curiosity, but it makes time interminably slow. He does so one day out of boredom, slung over his throne with nothing to do but slap his decorative riding crop against his boot heel, no goblins around to amuse him. He looks around furtively before he does so, knowing that Crowley is easily bought and Balthazar is just nosy, and honestly a king should be able to act however he pleases in his own realm, so he pulls a crystal out of the air.

He nearly drops it in surprise when he views its contents, then grips it more tightly, captivated at the sight of a nearly naked Dean entangled with an equally unclothed female. From the look on her face, it's clear she's enjoying his ministrations, and Castiel can't help but be transfixed at the play of muscles in Dean's shoulders, the way his lips trail across her skin...

"You dirty voyeur," says a voice from beside his ear. "Can you make this bigger?"

Castiel crunches the crystal into dust within his fist. "You have an uncanny knack for showing up exactly when I'd rather you didn't."

"It's called _lurking_. It's a highly developed skill that I worked on while you were teaching yourself to make shiny balls from thin air."

"Don't you have anything to do?"

"I _am _doing it."

"What, annoying me?"

Balthazar doesn't even grin in return. "Honestly, Castiel, how long can you keep this up?"

"As long as I please."

"Is the conquest of a single human really worth so much effort? Bring up another crystal so that I can at least see what he looks like properly, surely they've reached completion by now and are resting. I want to see what's causing all this trouble."

"I will not invade Dean's privacy for your amusement."

"Oh? You had no problem doing it for your own just now." Castiel glares, his eyes aglow with anger, but Balthazar just crosses his arms and looks back until Castiel crumples in defeated acknowledgement.

"I didn't mean to. I didn't know he would be...occupied."

"What? You thought he stayed chaste all year, dreaming of the moment when you would touch him again like some swooning fool?"

"Hardly." The bitterness is sharp on his tongue, cold on his lips. "He refuses me."

"Refuses? Refuses _you_?" Balthazar mentally assesses this information, nodding his head in some silent agreement with himself. 

"What?"

"I think that explains your obsession. The rejection makes you desire him more fiercely."

"I've been rejected before."

"Not by anyone you were actually interested in. I'm certain you propositioned Uriel just to needle him, and Muriel was a bet, as I recall."

"You should, as you're the one who bet me."

"You've never approached anyone seriously unless you felt their attraction was mutual, which for you seems to occur at an alarming rate that I would be jealous of, if I were not also devilishly attractive and irresistible." 

"I can also conjure sharp, pointed objects."

"Point taken." Balthazar raises his hands in mock defense. "Just tell me why else you would be obsessed with this human that has no interest in sleeping with you?"

"That's just it!" Castiel throws his head back, frustration overriding his caution. "I know that he wants me, Balthazar. His desire is palpable, all the signs are there. I can hear the quickening of his heart at my proximity, smell the warmth of his blood as it heats up beneath his skin with want. Yet he won't succumb to me, has outright told me he never shall."

"And tonight you were watching him in the willing embrace of another. How did that make you feel?"

"Utterly _livid_." 

"Jealous, you mean."

"I'm not..." 

"You _are,_" Balthazar states firmly, looking at Castiel sadly. "You feel for him, Castiel. Not lust, or not just that. Something more."

"I can't. I don't know how." 

"It seems you're learning. Or remembering." 

Castiel rubs his chest with the fingers of one hand, as if he can massage away the ache that seems to linger there of late, before creeping into his limbs, into the very tips of his fingers. The feeling that makes him want to reach out to touch Dean -- not with the fascination he once had, but with reverence. With comfort. He catches himself idly stroking his bottom lip with the pads of his fingers, thinking of when he had brushed their lips together long ago to seal their bargain, how he's longed to do so many times since. 

Balthazar's eyes track the movement, and he pulls his hand away.

"What do I do?"

"I've told you repeatedly what to do, and you don't listen. You ignored the advice that would have prevented this, choosing instead to ply me with vodka and bourbon to keep me quiet about it. Not that I mind in the least, of course, except for the part where you've inevitably discovered you have a heart and it has suddenly decided to make you increasingly aware of its existence." His face softens. "You say that he wants you but he won't give in, and there could be a dozen reasons why. Humans are strange creatures, and they bind themselves to illusion of morality and call it principle."

_That's what I want. Something with foundation. Something real._

What Castiel wants, Dean will not give; and what Dean wants, Castiel cannot -- for he exists in a different realm, his life filled with mazes and masquerades, illusions of shadow and glass, guardian to a kingdom of lost and forgotten things.

"There's no going back now, is there?" 

"No," Balthazar says sadly. "I'm afraid you were lost from the moment you touched him."

“I don’t understand.” He pushes himself out of his throne, pacing the room with long strides, running his fingers through his hair. “I was merely intrigued by him, by his devotion, and those _eyes. _I could not stop thinking about them the entire time they ran the labyrinth. I meant only to satisfy my curiosity, but the opportunity to spend more time with him presented itself and I took it, and now…” He stills, eyes staring unfocused into the distance. “Now it seems as though all the time in the world will not be enough.”

“I think we both know why you’re drawn to him,” Balthazar says, but Castiel holds up a hand to silence his train of thought. For once Balthazar obliges. They don’t talk much after that, and Balthazar doesn’t leave until he’s consumed enough wine to make sloshing sounds when he walks. Finally alone, Castiel ascends the stairs to his empty bedroom, where he sits on the balcony and gazes at the sky until dawn’s fingers creep above the horizon.


	5. Chapter 5

“I can’t believe Sam is going to Stanford after graduation!” Charlie’s excitement makes the speakers of his laptop crackle as they Skype. “And on a scholarship! It seems like just yesterday you were still driving that kid to the county library.”

“That’s probably how he _got_ that damn scholarship.”

“No doubt you worked just as hard for it as he did,” she teases. “How do you think your dad will take it when he leaves?”

“With relief, probably. They’re at each other’s throats all the time now, it seems like. I think the only reason I haven’t gotten a bigger place yet is because I didn’t want Sam moving onto my couch until he left for college.”

“Please. You haven’t gotten a real apartment because Bobby and Rufus are happy to let you stay there for free and put every extra cent you can into a college account for Sam. Now that he won’t need it, you can spend some money on a swanky bachelor pad for yourself.”

“I guess.”

“Yes, that’s the exact lack of enthusiasm I was looking for.”

“Yeah, I know, sorry.”

“What’s up?”

Dean rubs his face with both hands. “Ketch and I broke up.”

“Broke up? I wouldn’t even call what the two of you had dating. Who did the deed?”

“Him. He said he couldn’t see himself spending time with someone who was living in a closet, figuratively _and_ literally.”

“Ouch.”

“He’s not wrong, though.”

“Listen, if he couldn’t appreciate that you were willing to sacrifice a little bit to help out your brother, then he was never going to appreciate _you_, out or not.”

“Yeah,” Dean sighs. “It’s not like he was the type of guy I would have come out of the closet for anyway. Can you imagine me introducing Dad to a British douchebag with a motorbike and a hand tattoo to tell him that I’m bi?”

Charlie laughs so hard she slumps over the desk, and Dean smiles as he waits for her to recover. No one’s ever met the family, actually, and ever since he got burned by Rhonda Hurley he’s sworn to wait six months before doing the introductions.

“You definitely have a far different type when it comes to guys, that’s for sure. Every girl you’ve ever dated has been super sweet, pretty, shy. Ketch was none of those things.”

“Excuse you, he was _very _pretty.”

“If you say so. I wouldn’t know.” 

“And Aaron was nothing like him, come on now.”

“Please, you weren’t even into him.”

“Yes I was!”

“Dean. He was very sweet, but you did not have the hots for him. He was just patient with your fumbling hookup attempts, paving the way for your bi enlightenment. Like a gateway drug to bad boys in leather.”

He wants to protest, but he thinks of fitted breeches and knee-high leather boots, the feel of a kidskin glove on his fingertips, and reconsiders. 

_What I want is to have you writhing beneath me._

“Hey, can I talk to you about something? It’s...awkward.”

On the laptop screen Charlie sits up straighter, lacing her hands together in front of her and adopting a solemn expression. “The doctor is _in_. Hit me.”

“I have this friend who lives, uh, out of state. I’ve never told you about him before.”

“Why not?” 

He shifts uncomfortably. He can’t tell her the exact truth, but he needs to talk to someone he can trust, and he’s prepared to lie _just _enough for plausibility. “I only see him once a year, and our relationship is a little weird.”

“Weird how?”

_Weird because he’s the king of a fairy realm beyond our own, and I’m beholden to spend one night a year with him. Weird because I only agreed to this to save Adam and Sam. Weird because it doesn’t feel like the sacrifice it used to. Weird because he creates these fantastic places just for me and last year there was a unicorn, a fucking _unicorn_, and I could not stop smiling for three days. _

“He used to flirt with me constantly, everything from subtle looks to outright telling me that he wanted to take me to bed.”

“Ooh, direct. I like someone who can tell you exactly what they want.”

“I think he was the first guy I was ever consciously attracted to, you know? And I didn’t know what to do with that, you remember how I was in the beginning.”

“Disaster bisexual, one hundred percent.” She’s nodding in acknowledgement. “It took me forever to make you believe that Gordon was trying to fuck you. Although, he was such an asshole that I would have denied that, too, if I were you.”

“Ugh, I’d forgotten all about him.”

“You were definitely a late bloomer in the same-sex department. At twenty-two you still act like a fifteen-year old girl whenever you realize a guy is actually flirting with you, all embarrassed smiles and blushing until your freckles stand out, it’s honestly really adorable…”

“Charlie. Focus, please.”

“Sorry, sorry. Acknowledgement that you still don’t know what to do when guys are hinting that they’re into you, extrapolating data from that to imagine how you act with someone who’s very forthright. Moving on.”

“I told him I wasn’t interested, that I didn’t even like guys…” Charlie snorts, and he glares at her through the screen. “He’s intimidating okay? Especially because he’s way more experienced. Older.”

“Wait, gross ‘why is my biology teacher asking me to clean his pool for the summer’ older or distinguished and irresistibly hot ‘professor with a ponytail’ older?”

“_Not_ gross.” Charlie nods in the affirmative, probably thinking about every professor she’s been crushing over for the last four years. Or Cate Blanchett. “He was also very adamant that he wouldn’t take anything from me that I wasn’t willing to give. Said he was willing to wait as long as it took for me to get there. It used to piss me off, actually, that he was so sure I was attracted to him.”

“Because he was so sure of himself or because he saw right through you?”

“Ugh. Both, okay?”

“And you still haven’t hit this because?”

“Because he scares the shit out of me.”

“Sounds exciting.”

“_Charlie.”_

“What? Hot, experienced, older, factor in the free space and you just need one more square for bingo. Does he have a big dick?”

“Charlie!” 

“Right, you wouldn’t know, sorry. Good kisser?”

“_Charlene. Bradbury._”

“Low blow, Winchester. Quit stalling. Have you ever kissed this dude that you’re secretly pining for?”

“I am not _pining,” _he says heatedly, but Charlie just crosses her arms and raises an eyebrow. “Just once, the night we met. I’d hardly call it a kiss, though. More like a peck, there and gone.” 

It was enough, though, that he finds himself thinking about it now in unguarded moments, idly brushing the pad of his thumb across his lower lip, thinking of the spark of electricity he’d felt at the fleeting touch of that cool skin, or the way his fingers tingle each time he takes Castiel’s gloved hand. The way his whole body had wanted to arch up into him that night by the waterfall, and how it had taken everything he had to resist the urge, too afraid of things he can barely recollect anymore. Embarrassing himself with his inexperience, maybe, fearful of Castiel’s power -- or what it would mean for him to give in, like the final payment in a transaction he never wanted to be part of.

So he’d resisted, and congratulated himself on his presence of mind, resenting Castiel all the while for the deal they’d made. But that resentment has faded and left something else in its place, something keen with hunger. He’ll be in the shop, thoughts drifting as he works, and find himself thinking again and again of those thighs, those eyes and the heat in them, unlike anything he’s ever felt: not with Aaron and his patient guidance, not with Carmen’s perfect body under his hands, not with Ketch’s cocksure roughness. 

“Maybe the next time you see him you should do something about that.”

“It’s not that easy.” 

“How is it not easy? You put your lips on his lips and make the magic happen.”

Dean sighs, pinching the bridge of his nose. “It’s just...I feel like I still don’t know anything about him, even after all this time. I don’t know what I’d be getting myself into.”

“Oooh, mysterious.” Yes, mysterious and broody and strangely intoxicating, and it bothers Dean that he still knows so little about this man that he’s bound to for the rest of his life. “What’s his name, anyway?”

He’s reread the story in Sam’s tattered old book so many times over the years to know it by heart, and learned enough of what’s true to know which parts are for real. _Names have power_, it said, and so he holds it back like a precious thing, the revelation of it a choice that isn’t his to make.

“No way. I know how you are, you’ll be researching him in another tab before we even hang up.” 

“What are friends for? Trust me when I say that you’re well rid of Ketch. I would have intervened if it had gone on much longer anyway.”

“Thanks?”

“You’re welcome!” she says brightly. “But listen: with Mr. Mystery, it seems like you’re obviously interested in whatever he’s offering. Maybe you should take him up on it. No one’s saying it has to be forever. It could just be one night.”

“Right. One night.” _Forever and ever._

***

Dean is lying on his bed in the semi-dark, waiting, but he still jumps in surprise when Castiel steps out of the shadows, perfectly visible as if he’s a light source all his own. He holds out a gloved hand without comment, and Dean grasps it firmly as he closes his eyes before opening them to new surroundings.

It’s a surface of water festooned with flowers in a dozen different colors, lily pads scattered amongst them, the proportions so enormous that they are standing on one of them like a giant raft in the middle of a lazy river.

“Have we shrunk, or is everything else just huge?”

“That depends on your perspective,” Castiel says with a grin, stretching out on the lilypad beneath them, clasping his fingers behind his head and resting it on the petal of a nearby flower. Dean spends a few minutes trying to take it all in, from the rust-colored sky to the banks of the pond that sparkle like diamonds, then makes himself comfortable on the opposite side of the same lily pad. He faces Castiel, their legs parallel to one another, and notices that the soles of his boots -- flat this time, with just a small heel -- are completely unmarred, as though he doesn’t actually touch the ground when he walks. 

“How long do you think you can keep this up?” he asks, alarmed when the mirth leaves Castiel’s face in a hurry. “What did I say?” 

“Nothing.”

“Something. You look like a goose walked over your grave.”

Castiel tilts his head. “I do not understand that reference, as I am not yet buried and have no fear of geese.”

“You should. Those fuckers have teeth and they’re mean as hell.” Castiel looks even more confused, so Dean relents. “It means you got this look on your face like you’d thought of something you wished you hadn’t, that’s all.”

“I see.”

“So what was it?”

“A recurring disagreement with my brother that I’d rather not think about. Tell me about yours instead. Was the birthday observance pleasant?” 

“Hardly. I should probably be glad that Dad and Sam are no longer shouting at every meal, but they’ve graduated to silently glaring at each other until the whole room is uncomfortable. At least Adam seems oblivious, blathering on about how he’s going to try out for little league this summer, and asking if I’ll still play catch with him after Sam leaves for school.” He lets his fingers trail in the water, crisp and cool even though the air on his skin is warm. 

“Your brother is leaving?” 

“Yeah, uh. He got an academic scholarship to a great university -- that means they’ll pay for his education -- but it’s in another part of the country, so I’ll probably only see him when he comes home for the holidays. I’m really proud of him, but I’ll miss him.” He gives Castiel a discerning look. “Do you know what that is? To miss someone?”

Castiel looks at him for a long time, surveying him in utter stillness. “Yes.” 

“Are you lonely, Castiel?”

“Why would I be?”

“I don’t know. I don’t know anything about you. I know that you’re more than four hundred years old, and that you have a brother who annoys you, and that you rule a kingdom full of unwanted boys and girls that have turned into goblins.”

“Yes, hundreds of them, so it’s impossible to be lonely.”

“I doubt that. They don’t seem the type for conversation. Who do you talk to?”

“You, of course.”

“One night a year. What do you do with the other three hundred and sixty-four?” 

“I rule.”

“I mean for _fun_, Cas.” He doesn’t miss the sharp look he gets at the nickname. “What do you do for fun?”

Castiel doesn’t answer right away, eyes drifting to one of the banks as though he’s studying the way they glitter in the light. He seems perplexed at the question rather than angry, and Dean takes the time to study his profile: the way his brow is furrowed in thought, the straight angle of his nose above pale lips, firm jaw above the long column of his throat. He’s grateful that Castiel creates such elaborate settings for each visit, because the surroundings are the only thing that can make him look away from such a compelling sight, the only constant in every landscape.

“I don’t think we have the same concept of entertainment as you do,” he finally says, turning back to face Dean though he doesn’t meet his eyes. “The fae have elaborate balls full of music and dancing and food and drink, themed parties and masquerades, excuses for us to converge in one space to gossip and backbite.”

“So which Heather are you?” Dean laughs at the squint-eyed look Castiel gives him. “Nothing, it’s from a movie. And no,” he says when Castiel opens his mouth, “I will not explain the entire plot to you because you want to change the subject. We’ve been talking about me for years, we’re talking about you now.” Castiel crosses his arms with a petulant look, and Dean grins back at him. “You don’t seem much like a social butterfly, honestly.”

“I’m not. I detest these gatherings and everyone at them.”

“I thought you slept with _all of them,” _he teases, the small upturn at the corner of Castiel’s mouth like a trophy. 

“Why do you think I detest them all?” 

“Touché. So if you hate them so much, why do you go?”

“It is...expected. I don’t particularly care to do what anyone expects me to, but Balthazar persists because despite his love for gossip, he doesn’t enjoy it when it’s about me. He’d much prefer having a companion to gossip with.”

“Companion. Right.” _Who is Balthazar? _Dean’s not prepared for the sinking feeling in his stomach, like a stone has been dropped into it. He peers over the side of the lilypad with intent, staring at the multi-colored pebbles scattered across the bottom, the water as clear as liquid glass running between his fingers. He stares at the lake bottom until he’s sure his voice won’t waver. 

“He the protective type?”

“He wouldn’t readily admit it, but I think so. Especially when it comes to me.”

“Well, you’re special.” In his peripheral vision he can see Castiel look at him strangely, and he bites his lip before he can give himself away any further. So Castiel has found another lover, finally tired of waiting for the human to figure himself out. Dean is just an interesting specimen now, something for the goblin king to observe at a distance, any thought of conquest long forgotten.

He wonders what the average length of a relationship is among the fae, who usually live hundreds of years beyond the span of any human life. Surely it’ll be more than the mere three months Dean has managed. He frantically does math in his head: if a human is an adult at eighteen and the fae at four hundred, that’s an equivalent of twenty-two years of life experience for each one of his, which is not quite two years for each month, but he rounds up for the sake of ease, and that means that for Castiel a casual relationship could take six years of Dean’s life -- and that’s only if it’s not serious, which means it’s entirely likely he’s missed any chance he had...

“Dean?” His head jerks up and he swallows hard at Castiel’s proximity, at the concerned look on his face, and he moves away quickly.

“Sorry, sorry. My mind was wandering.” He clears his throat, but it does nothing to dislodge the lump. “The water, it’s...hypnotic.”

Castiel actually looks pleased, and moves back to his previous position with ease. 

“Tell me more about the court,” Dean finally asks. “I want to hear all the gossip.” What he wants is not to talk for the rest of the night, lest the hurt in his voice betray him. He’s never been sure exactly what Castiel wants from him, but he’s spent the past year considering what he wants from Castiel, and now it seems he waited too long to take the leap.

Once again he finds himself in his own bed with no memory of how he got there, blinking sleepily at the familiar walls of his small room. He flops back onto his back and stares at the ceiling until it begins to blur, and then he turns his face into the pillow. 

***

“So what happened?” He thinks that Charlie would have asked that with a squeal if they’d had this conversation immediately after his visit with Castiel, but the two weeks he’s spent dodging her calls has modified her tone into one of sad resignation. 

“He’s seeing someone.” Saying it out loud finalizes it in a way that time hasn’t, and he puts his face in his hands. 

“I’m sorry, sweetie. But it’s not the end of the world!” A hopeful note creeps into her voice, and he drops his hands again, shaking his head. “It might not even last, you could always wait and see.”

“Sure, whatever.” He only says it to mollify her, because he’s certain now that whatever he wanted to explore with Castiel is gone, and it’s probably only a matter of time before the goblin king realizes that his yearly visits with a humble human aren’t worth the trouble. The math works, he thinks glumly, since it took almost six years for Castiel to come to the same conclusion it took for his exes to reach in a few months: Dean Winchester is not worth the time.

“Whatever you’re thinking, you’re wrong.”

“How do you know?”

“Because I’m your friend, and I know how your mind works. I also know that you feel pretty vulnerable right now: you just got out of a relationship, Sam is leaving for school soon, and things have been pretty tense between him and your dad for a while.” The thing he loves most about Charlie is the reasonable way she looks at a situation, explaining it so rationally that he can’t even form an argument. “Mr. Mystery didn’t move on because there’s something wrong with you, or because you’re not good enough. Things just didn’t work out. It doesn’t make you a bad person. Sometimes the unfortunate consequence of playing hard to get is that someone else intercepts to catch them before you get tired of running.” Okay, it might be the thing he also hates the most about her.

“I wasn’t playing hard to get, I just…”

“You weren’t ready, you were intimidated, you didn’t even really like the guy at first and only hung out with him out of a sense of obligation, whatever noble bullshit that is. You got to know him better, and now you not only see past all the things that used to rub you the wrong way, you actually like the guy. It doesn’t mean you can change how you felt in the past because those things were all valid, and you can’t beat yourself up for feeling them, even if you’re missing out on your crush now.”

“I don’t have a _crush_.”

“Aw, yes you do,” she teases him in sing-song, “and it’s totally adorable, but this too shall pass. As soon as you meet someone new, you’ll forget all about Mr. Mystery. It probably won’t even take that long for you to meet your next distraction, for none can resist the power of your ass.”

“You resist it just fine.”

“Only because you’re sitting on it right now, but I have spent a lot of time studying it and it is glorious.”

“Stop it or people will think you’re straight.”

“Asses are without gender, Dean, they just _are_, and yours _definitely _is.” He laughs, because of course he does, and Charlie grins. “Mr. Mystery is missing out, my friend. His loss.” He laughs even harder, and when Charlie puts her hand over the webcam he dutifully smacks the laptop screen with an internet high-five. 

***

It requires a lot more work to help Sam pack for school than it did for Dean to move out of the house entirely. They spend two full Sunday afternoons sifting through the last five years of Sam’s life, carefully sorting what he’ll leave, what he’ll take, what he’ll donate. 

“Can’t believe you’re going all the way to California.” 

“I can’t _wait_.” Sam is pulling everything off the top shelf of his closet, wrinkling his nose at the dust that rains down as he pulls things from the farthest corner. “I hate it here. Can’t wait to see the back of this place, meet some people I actually have things in common with, you know?”

“I don’t, actually.” Sam turns to him, wide-eyed and apologetic, turning to confusion when Dean starts laughing. It takes a second for him to frown before he runs his hands through his shaggy hair, knocking off the dusty clumps clinging to it.

“Jerk.”

“Bitch.” 

Sam’s posture sags, shoulders rounding as he looks at Dean through his sweat-soaked bangs. “I didn’t mean it like that. I just really want to be able to make my own choices about my life, finally. Being away from you is the only part of this that’s hard. I mean, Kate’s been wonderful to me and Adam’s a great kid, but I’ve always felt out of place around them and Dad together.” 

“I know. It’s okay. I’m proud of you. You’re gonna do great.” He manages not to choke as he says it, and Sam smiles faintly before turning to place a hand on the bookshelf next to his closet; empty now, a thin layer of dust that stops where dozens of spines lined the three shelves the only evidence of their recent occupation. “Wish I could take this with me.”

“It doesn’t exactly fit in the overhead compartment. Besides, you put most of the books in the donate pile.”

“Yeah.” Sam’s eyes flick to the boxes of donations, then back to the bookshelves. “I keep thinking I’m missing one, but I can’t remember exactly which. Just the distinct feeling that one is missing.” Dean says nothing, thinking of that battered volume in the top drawer of his dresser, cover missing and a leaf pressed between the pages as fresh as if it had fallen off the tree this morning. Sam finally shakes his head. “It’s probably something that I read so often I just _think_ I owned it.”

“You had so many library fines it probably would have been cheaper to buy some of them.” Sam laughs, and Dean relaxes. “You should go clean up, Kate will call us down for dinner soon.”

“Great. Another two hours of forced interaction with Dad.”

“Let’s just try to get through this last family dinner in peace, okay?”

“As long as you’re still the one who’s going to drive me to the airport tomorrow, I’ll be on my best behavior.”

“Wouldn’t miss it.” He’ll reconsider that in less than twenty-four hours, as he watches his brother walk away from him in the middle of a crowded airport, but by then it will be too late. Dean will watch him join the security line, only three people long by some miracle, his little brother towering over a diminutive TSA agent who directs him where to go, and then raise his hand at Sam’s last triumphant wave in his direction before he puts on his shoes and disappears towards his gate.

***

“Young lady, I told you we don’t need to be buying no goddamn ad.” Rufus isn’t yelling, but the dismissive tone in his voice carries all the way to the back door of the shop as Dean comes in, deftly carrying two takeout bags and a drink carrier as he shoves the door shut with his foot. He looks at Bobby, sitting behind a spacious desk in the corner balancing their books, years of practice letting him tune Rufus out as he deftly punches numbers into an adding machine, stubbornly double-checking what Excel has already done for him. 

“You should probably go and rescue whoever that is,” he says gruffly, not looking up. “You know how Rufus gets when he’s hungry.”

“I’m on it.” He sets their lunch down on the small table and ducks through the door leading into the storefront as quickly as he can, the various displays blocking his view as he takes the shortest path to the front counter, arriving just as Rufus is opening his mouth to refute whatever the young woman just said to him. 

“Miss, I…”

“I’ll take it from here,” Dean interrupts smoothly, stepping between the two of them and pushing Rufus in the direction of the backroom. “Lunch is here. They gave me extra egg rolls for the additional wait, go get them while they’re hot.” 

“About time you got back,” Rufus grumbles before walking away without any further argument. Dean watches him go with his hands on his hips, then shakes his head to turn to their visitor. 

“Sorry about that,” he says. “I should have been back twenty minutes ago, and he gets really cranky when his blood sugar is out of whack.”

“Oh, is he diabetic?”

“No, just old and cranky.” Dean smiles when she laughs, then holds out a hand for her to shake. “Dean Winchester, apprentice to the grumpy dude and his partner.”

“Cassie Robinson,” she replies, shaking his hand deftly. “Intern at the local paper who is stuck selling ad space until she makes her bones.” 

“You were holding your own pretty well there. Not many can handle Rufus in a full-on snit.”

“Thank you, but I’m not sorry about the upgrade.” She gives him a close-mouthed smile, and Dean is drawn by the fullness of her lips and the twinkle in her dark eyes. “Maybe I’ll have better luck with you.”

“Well, I’m afraid I have lunch plans already, but maybe you could give me your sales pitch another time. Say, dinner? Friday night?”

By the time Dean finally puts the _Out to Lunch_ sign in the door and makes his way into the back, his noodles are cold, but he focuses on eating them while both Rufus and Bobby smirk at him.

“Took you long enough to get her number,” Rufus says, leaning back in his chair with his arms crossed, and Dean rolls his eyes.

“Leave him be,” Bobby says, wiping his mouth and crumpling the napkin in his fist. “He’s been in a funk for months now, maybe he’s finally starting to see the light again.”

“Well, sure. A pretty girl will help anyone pull their head out of the dark, which is all you’re gonna get with your head up your ass.”

Dean just rolls his eyes and rips open a packet of soy sauce with his teeth.

***

The thing is, spending time with Cassie really does help ease the ache that’s been lingering in his chest, like the tail end of pneumonia that just doesn’t want to leave your lungs. She’s smart and attentive, and Dean can see the burgeoning journalist in her by the way she asks him questions. She’s also very pretty -- curly brown hair, dark eyes, smooth skin -- with a smile lovely enough to light the room when he finally gets to see it in all its glory.

They come together so naturally that he never stops to second guess it, and it’s not until Thanksgiving is upon them that he realizes that they’re actually a couple.

“It’s not that I don’t want you to meet my parents,” she says pragmatically as they munch popcorn before the previews have even started. “I know they’ll love you, eventually. I just think it’s too soon for that step, you understand?” 

“Sure. I get it. We haven’t been together long enough for a meet the parents scenario.” When _will _they be together long enough, he wonders, doing the math in his head again. For that matter, exactly when did it become official that they’re a _couple_ couple? Should he count from the day they met? No, it should probably be from their first date, although they were still really casual back then, and he can’t remember if they ever had a conversation where they confirmed they were boyfriend/girlfriend, do people even _do_ that? It could be from the first time they had sex, maybe, but she hadn’t even been there when he’d woken up and that doesn’t seem very girlfriendy...

“Next year, though.” She winks at him, dissolving his train of thought entirely. “Plan on it.”

Sam does not come home for Thanksgiving. “Flights are expensive, Dean, and it’s not like I want to spend another uncomfortable dinner at Dad’s house. It’s just better this way. One of my friends is local, he invited me for the holiday.”

The meal is less tense without Sam and John glaring at each other, but only just. Dean excuses himself to help Kate wash dishes as John takes Adam into the living room to watch football, but she doesn’t say anything as they clear the table and put all the leftovers in appropriately sized containers. Not until she’s rinsing things in the sink and handing them over for Dean to put into the dishwasher.

“I’ve been trying to get your dad to go to therapy,” she says, unprompted, though she doesn’t look at him. He’s so surprised he nearly drops the plate she hands him, but manages to rally and slide it into the rack just as she passes him another.

“I can’t imagine how he took that,” he says carefully.

“I think you can.” He can’t think of a response, so he just takes a few more plates from her. “It’s my fault, how bad things were between him and Sam.”

“What? No, it’s not, why would you think that?”

She sighs, turning the water off and glancing towards the den just as John cheers at the TV screen, Adam giving an equally enthusiastic rendition in a much lower pitch, and the ghost of a smile crosses her face before she turns serious again. 

“You boys, you’ve always been so secretive about what your lives were like before John and I married. I mean, I knew he always took you with him wherever he went, from job to job. It never occurred to me to think about what that actually meant.” She dries her hands on a dishtowel, then wraps it around her hands, twisting it as she talks to him. “Not long after you moved out, I woke up one night to tend to Adam, and it wasn’t until I outside the door to his room that I realized the sounds of distress weren’t coming from the nursery.”

Dean closes the dishwasher, leaning on the counter and closing his eyes. “I didn’t know he still had nightmares. He never said.” 

“I didn’t even know he’d had them before. You were always there to take care of him, weren’t you?” He nods, throat tight. “I managed to wake him up, got him some water and calmed him down. I asked him what he’d dreamed about, and he told me a story about mazes and monsters, from a book you used to read to him when he was little.” 

“Yeah,” he manages to say, standing upright and turning to lean one hip against the counter. In essence, what Sam said was true, even if he didn’t tell Kate everything he dreamed about was real -- maybe because he’d already been pretending it wasn’t for the better part of a year, then. “It was his favorite, but in hindsight inappropriate for a little kid.”

“Which you didn’t realize, since you weren’t more than a little kid yourself.” He clenches his jaw, but doesn’t answer. “I sat next to him on the bed, just stroking his hair until he went back to sleep. He said you used to do that for him when he had bad dreams, so I asked him to tell me about other things you used to do for him.”

“Shit.”

“It didn’t even register for him how much he revealed. He was half-asleep after all.” She throws the towel on the counter with a sigh. “It weighed on me. I would wonder why Sam never mentioned doing anything with your dad, in unguarded moments when he would talk about something from his childhood. Sam only associated those things with _you, _but I could never bring myself to ask either of you about it. Then I finally asked your dad.”

“Kate.”

“I know you think he lost his temper, but that’s not what happened. He broke down, actually.”

“He...he did what?”

She nods. “He’s riddled with so much guilt about how you grew up, the both of you, and he doesn’t possess the tools to talk to either of you about it. Or even to me, really, though I managed to get enough out of him to figure it out.”

“What are you, some kind of emotional ninja?”

“Nurse.” She shrugs. “Patient assessment isn’t always about the physical trauma. Sometimes the emotional trauma does the most damage. In any case, it’s been really hard on him since Sam left. Your dad’s afraid he’ll never come back, and he doesn’t know how to give him a reason to.”

“So you’re trying to get him to talk to a professional, so he can, what? Learn to apologize to Sam?”

“And you,” she says pointedly. “But not just that. He’s got a lot of unprocessed grief about your mother, and it led to making a lot of bad choices that turned you boys into collateral damage.”

“Does that bother you? Her memory, I mean.”

She tilts her head, looking thoughtful. “It could, I suppose, but...no. He loved her, and she died, and that’s a terrible thing for so many reasons. It doesn’t make sense for me to be jealous of someone I’ve never known and will never get to. If anything it shows me how deeply John feels things, even when he pretends he doesn’t: love and grief and guilt, deep wells of them beneath a still surface.” 

“A nurse poet, even.”

She pokes him in the ribs. “I’m saying that I know how it must have felt for him to drag you boys along when he decided to make a new life for himself with me. All those years of having to fend for yourselves, moving from place to place, him off doing god knows what to avoid the shame of how badly he was failing you. He’s trying to make up for it with Adam, but that doesn’t change the fact that his other two children are walking wounded, and they need him as much as the rest of us.” 

She wraps her arms around him without warning, squeezing him tight, and he embraces her reflexively in his surprise. 

“I’m okay,” he says. “I’m okay, Kate.”

“You are. But you shouldn’t be. I don’t know how you manage to keep it all locked up inside.”

“I don’t.” She pulls away, smoothing her hair and looking up at him quizzically. “I don’t go to therapy or anything, but...I talk about it. Not to just anyone, but people I care about, like Charlie and Bobby and…” _Castiel_. He stops himself short, shaking his head. “It helps.”

“It seems so.” She glances towards the den again. “It’s what I want for your dad, and Sam, too.”

“Well, you won’t have to convince Sam to go to therapy. He probably signed up for it as soon as he got off the plane.” 

She laughs, shaking her head. “Good. One less person to worry about.” She pats him on the arm, turning the water back on. “I’ll keep working on it. Go out and watch the game with them, Adam will love it. He loves both you boys, you know? He brags all the time in school about his big brothers, how cool they are.”

“Well, I am very cool, no doubt about that.”

She grabs the towel again to snap it at him, and he grins as he heads to the den, standing in the doorway for a few moments to watch John Winchester in his recliner, his youngest son perched on his knees. 

***

Sam doesn’t come back for Christmas either, opting instead to work over break while he stays in the apartment of another friend who went home for the holidays, watering the plants and feeding the cat. Dean nods in agreement when Sam explains that it’s better for him to earn money than to spend it on a plane ticket, trying not to think about how cleaning up cat vomit and talking to ferns for three weeks is preferable to spending time with the only family you have left.

It helps that come New Year’s Eve there’s someone for him to kiss at midnight, and when Cassie wraps her arm around his neck he feels comfortable and safe, lifting her off her feet to spin her around as she laughs. Fireworks go off outside, and they rush out into the cold with the other revelers, their eyes pinned to the sky. Dean spares a glance at her face bathed in green and gold light, reminded of another face, in another place. He blinks the image away, turning his eyes upward, holding her hand and reminding himself that _this _is real, this is what you can build a future on. 


	6. Chapter 6

Castiel dresses with care, trying to tamp down his eager anticipation to see Dean. He reminds himself that he is the ruler of a kingdom and giddy feelings are beneath him. That he is ancient and ageless and wise, and does not feel weak in the knees at the thought of a human who only ever resists his charms. He takes several deep breaths before descending the staircase to the throne room.

“Is everything in readiness?”

“Of course,” Crowley says, and when Castiel raises an eyebrow he continues as contemptuously as possible. “Your Highness.”

“Bog, Crowley.”

“Yes, of course sire, how could I forget?” 

“You may go and occupy yourself until morning.”

Crowley makes a mocking bow, backing out of the room with a grand sweep of his arms, and Castiel rolls his eyes as he adjusts one ruffled cuff. He closes his eyes in concentration, focusing on Dean’s essence, feeling the thread of it through the universe and following the path between the stars until he alights in an unfamiliar room. 

He suddenly regrets the restraint he has shown over the past year, refusing to watch Dean’s daily life in his crystals, leaving him unprepared for the sight of him curled around another delicate body with a sense of familiarity and calm that Castiel hates immediately. 

Dean wakes with a start, sitting up in bed to stare at his visitor as though he’s never seen him before. 

“I believe we have a standing appointment,” Castiel says lowly, trying not to growl, “or have you forgotten the obligation you owe to me in exchange for your brothers’ freedom?”

Dean swallows, glancing over his shoulder in alarm, and Castiel sighs.

“She will not wake until dawn, I assure you.”

“Did you do something to her?” Dean asks sharply, getting out of the bed in nothing but a pair of shorts, and Castiel can’t even pretend to look away. He notes the effect time has had on Dean’s physical features: the broadening of his shoulders and thighs, the soft roundness of his face more chiselled, chin darkened by coarse hair as though he’s letting it go on purpose. Castiel has only seen him this unclothed in brief glimpses in the curve of enchanted glass, and those do not compare to seeing the trail of light hair that disappears into the jeans he pulls over his hips, before covering himself with a long-sleeved shirt. 

“Of course not.” His voice is a mixture of jealousy and spite, giving Dean pause as he straightens the shirt across his hips. “You did, when you made a covenant with me.”

“Fine. Let’s go then.”

Dean takes his hand, gripping it hard, and Castiel nearly winces before transporting them back to his realm, fumbling the landing. They both tumble when they set down, falling into clouds of spun-gold, and Dean rolls over and blinks stupidly at their surroundings as though he’s forgotten why he was mad.

“Neat,” is all he says, and Castiel sighs. 

There's always been something about Dean Winchester that he could not put his finger on, something that drew him to the human out of curiosity, fascination. That's how it had begun, and again and again he exhausted himself, crafting spurious landscapes to entertain him, a seduction of sight and sound that he’d hoped would lead to one in the more traditional sense. Tonight’s result is not what he expected when he began, and he thinks of that lovely figure warming Dean’s bed, feeling himself a fool. 

“So,” Dean continues, hands on his hips as he peers into the painted sky, streaked in pastels like a watercolor painting brought to life. “Let’s get this over with. What do you want to talk about this time?” 

The tone in Dean’s voice is so chilling that Castiel freezes with a dozen questions on his tongue, then returns like for like. “Perhaps you could explain your hostility to me first.”

“Explain? You just showed up in my girlfriend’s apartment and got me out of bed to kidnap me for the evening. How do you expect anything but hostility?”

“I expect you to direct it at the correct party, if you’re still feeling it after all this time.” His voice is quiet, but his tone ripples with a seething rage that makes Dean take a step back. “‘Twas your brother Sam who disturbed _my _evening to ask me to take your baby brother off his hands, as I recall, and it was you who begged me to take something, _anything_, in exchange for their freedom when Sam failed to beat the labyrinth.” He takes a step towards Dean, who falls back into the cloud, staring up at him with wide eyes. “You have no idea what I could have demanded as payment, knowing you would have accepted it in your foolish desperation. The fae have made puppets of humans who made foolish choices for granted wishes, only to find that what they asked for was not worth the price.”

“I…” Dean tries to shuffle backward but the cloud doesn’t budge, and Castiel’s anger and hurt hone themselves into words so sharp as to draw blood. 

“You spit anger in my direction because I disturbed you with your lover, though you know full well that we have an appointment that falls on this night but once a year. Did you think I would quietly excuse myself because you had _company, _as though you had not made a bargain with me for both of their lives? A bargain so tame, so utterly laughable given what it bought, that I needs must keep it a secret from my brethren lest I become the laughingstock of my kind?”

“I’m sorry!” Dean holds his hands up in defeat, and Castiel stills at the look of fear on his face, even worse than their first meeting when it had curiosity mixed in to tone it down. He turns away, stalking to the other edge of their perch, keeping his back to Dean as he tries to regain control of himself. “I’m sorry,” Dean says again, softly. “You’re right, okay? I made a bargain.”

For the first time in six years, Castiel wants to be anywhere but where Dean is. “Do you wish to rescind our agreement and leave the fate of your brothers in my hands?” He does not know what he will do if Dean says yes, not because he has any intention of taking Sam and Adam anywhere, but because Dean will not be the person he thinks he is if he does.

“No.” He says it firmly, with conviction, and Castiel closes his eyes in relief. 

“Shall I leave you here alone until it is time to return you?”

“No.” 

“I suppose my company is better than none at all.”

“Look, I fucked up, okay? Can we start again?”

Castiel looks over his shoulder, noting the sorrow and regret on Dean’s face, and his anger leaves him like a wave retreating from the shore. He lowers himself to the surface of the cloud, and Dean relaxes, leaning forward over his crossed knees. 

“I should have gone home tonight. I shouldn’t have accused you of doing anything to hurt Cassie. And I shouldn’t have used the ‘k’ word.”

“Cassie.”

“My girlfriend. We’ve been together for almost a year now.”

“That’s wonderful.” It is not wonderful. When did he acquire this human trait of saying the opposite of what you mean? 

“Thanks.” Dean clears his throat, pulling at the substance he’s sitting on. “How’s Balthazar?”

“Incorrigible as always. Why?” He doesn’t know why Dean would ask about his brother out of nowhere, but he’s used to Dean’s non sequiturs and doesn't try to follow the train of thought.

“Just asking. To be polite. This stuff feels like cotton candy, the kind we always used to make for the carnival. Is it edible?”

“No. What is candy cotton?”

“It’s a treat you have in the summertime, sugar spun into giant clouds for you to eat. It dissolves in your mouth, turning your lips blue or pink, whatever color the candy was.”

“That sounds as strange as your change of subject.”

“Yeah, well. I feel stupid, so naturally my thoughts went in the same direction.” 

It is the longest night of Castiel’s life, and he feels like he’s standing on a precipice for hours on end. When the morning comes he returns Dean back into his bed, sleepy and loose-limbed, and watches him curl around the inert figure already there, pulling her close and burying his face in her hair. He's never understood the human concept of love before, but he's sure it must be like this: comfort taken and comfort given, just by proximity. 

It must be, because his own heart aches with unanswered longing, affection undimmed by abstinence. Cutting himself off from Dean has done nothing to quell it, and he knows the only thing that can soothe it is having his love returned. He should be happy that Dean has found someone he cares for, someone that will care for him in return; but he is the goblin king, not an altruist.

He procures double the quantity of alcohol than usual before he returns to his own realm, knowing he will need it for himself. 

***

It’s so easy to be with Cassie that it’s been a year before Dean knows it, and he’s glad to have her there that first summer when Sam decides to stay in California. She’s easy with John and Kate and even Adam when he finally takes her home to Sunday dinner, her genuine interest in everyone making for a more animated affair than ever before. Charlie is thrilled to finally meet her, elbowing Dean in the ribs when he introduces them and uses the word “girlfriend,” then elbowing him again later when Cassie goes to the bar to replenish their drinks and calling her a “keeper.”

He keeps waiting for the other shoe to drop -- for her to get unhappy with his lack of ambition, the hours he puts into the shop, the tiny efficiency apartment he still lives in above the shop, even though he graduated out of apprenticeship years ago -- but it doesn’t happen. In fact, they never really fight about anything, only who gets the last dumpling and whose turn it is to choose the movie.

_This must be what love is really like_, he thinks to himself, though neither of them ever say it to one another. 

He excuses himself to go home alone on the night of Sam’s birthday.

“I need to talk to him about Dad joining AA,” he says. “He’s gonna call late, and I know you have to be up early. Besides, I don’t know that I want you to listen to all the gory details of our childhood.”

“You know I’d be willing to listen if you ever wanted to talk about it. We’ve been together for almost two years, Dean.”

“I know.” It’s easy to share the day-to-day things with her, but telling her about the past is different, somehow, like it will leave him exposed to the nerves. “Someday.” 

He kisses her on the forehead before he leaves, then sits in his apartment for an hour waiting for a call that never comes. It’s not the real reason he wants to be left alone anyway; he can miss a call from Sam on any day of the week, and the ones they do have are perfunctory, rote, like so many other things in Dean’s life that don’t excite him. His mind wanders as he stares at the laptop screen in the growing dark, wondering if this is all his life will be now, a succession of monotonous tasks: go to work, join family dinner, run errands, get ignored by Sam, date Cassie…

His mind is still wandering when he feels the spark of electric current as Castiel arrives promptly just before midnight and holds out his hand, and despite all their harsh words to each other last time he takes it without thinking, a shock tingling up his arm and into every limb of his body. The pull of attraction that still hasn’t left him, even after all this time. 

Being with Castiel is not easy, but maybe that’s what makes it so tantalizing, and Dean curses himself for all the things he wants too late and shouldn’t at all.

***

“Do you have the flar blar?”

“The what? Goddammit, can’t you enunciate properly in your old age?”

“Essa duja flar…”

“Bobby? What the hell? Bobby!”

Dean drops his brush, cursing as it falls to his feet, sawdust clinging to the damp bristles like magnets. “Everything okay out there?” He’s been listening to these two yell at one another for years now, but he’s never heard alarm in Rufus’ voice before. He heads to the storefront and trots up the nearest aisle until he can see Rufus kneeling on the floor, and one look at Bobby’s slack-jawed face makes Dean pick up the phone and dial 911. 

“My boss is having a stroke,” he says with a calm he doesn’t feel, and Rufus drops back on his ass and puts his head in his hands as Dean gives them the address and tells them to hurry. 

Rufus grips Bobby’s left hand tightly with both of his once they get him onto a stretcher, and he doesn’t let go even as they put him into the ambulance. Dean follows it to the hospital, limbs heavy with dread, then stays in the waiting room with Rufus, bringing him cups of tepid coffee from the vending machine down the hall.

“Is there anyone we need to call? Any family, or...” He’s alarmed to think that even after all this time he doesn’t know the answer, but Rufus shakes his head. 

“All of his family is sitting right here.” He looks at Dean, then looks down at himself, then shakes his head. “Pretty sorry goddamn excuse for one if you ask me.” 

“Speak for yourself, old man.” Rufus grins briefly before he sips from his cup. “What about you?”

“I got a mean ass ex-wife, lives in Georgia.” 

“She’s bound to be mean, after being married to you for any length of time. How long did it take?’

“Oh, about twenty years.”

“Twenty? Twenty _years_.”

“Sure enough.”

“Christ. I can’t be in the same room with you for twenty straight minutes.” They both laugh, comfortable with their usual routine, and Dean almost forgets why they’re there. “Can’t believe you got rid of the only person who could stand to be around you for any length of time.”

“Oh, she wasn’t the only one.” He clears his throat, and Dean’s about to tell him that he really doesn’t want to hear about Rufus cheating on his wife, that whatever happened is none of his business, but… “We had a daughter.”

He doesn’t miss the tense. “I’m sorry.” Rufus leans forward, reaching into his back pocket to pull out his wallet, flipping it open to a single photograph of a pretty girl with a big smile in a graduation cap and gown, holding a prop diploma up to her heart, the standard issue photo for every high school senior. 

“Sharai.” 

“She’s beautiful.”

“Yeah.” He looks at the picture, running his finger down the curve of her cheek. “She wanted to be a doctor,” he says softly. “Surgeon, maybe.” He closes the wallet carefully, holding it loosely in his hands, dangling between his knees. “She was nineteen. She was coming home from a party with some friends, they’d all been drinking, so naturally there was a car accident. Sharai was in the passenger seat, went through the windshield. Took twelve days for me to convince my wife to take her off life support. Took another ten months for her to leave me.” He shrugs, leaning to replace the wallet in his back pocket. “Sharai’s friends didn’t make it, and the guy they hit lost his wife and the use of both of his legs. And now he’s in there trying to beat me to the goddamn finish line.”

“What, Bobby?”

“You know that son of a bitch made me go to grief counseling with him? _Grief counseling._ A group hug with strangers in a church basement with coffee worse than this and a mediocre selection of donuts.”

“You…” He slumps against the back of the chair, trying to take it all in. “I don’t even know what to say.”

“Nothing for you to say. Life, and death, they work in strange ways. People get taken away when they shouldn’t, and other people show up you never expected to be there. Maybe they’re only there because of a sense of duty, and maybe you only lets them in because you’re looking for a way to bury your grief, but when enough time passes you no longer remember why they’re there. Just that they _are_.” 

***

“Bobby doesn’t have anyone except Rufus, and he’ll hurt himself trying to take care of them both.” Just as he did when he first moved into this apartment, Dean is shoving all his clothes into a big garbage bag, though he does have considerably more than he did eight years ago.

“I know, it’s just, I thought when you finally moved out of here it would be because you were moving in with _me._”

“What?” He stops what he’s doing, black plastic clutched in his left hand and a crumpled pair of jeans in his right. “You want to move in together?”

“Dean, we’ve been together for almost four years. Haven’t you thought about it at all?” Cassie is sitting in the middle of his bed, legs folded beneath her, staring at him quizzically.

“Are you...are you asking me to choose between moving in with you, or moving in with Rufus and Bobby to help out after his stroke?”

“No, god, of course not!” He relaxes at the outright alarm on her face, sitting on the edge of the bed. “That’s not what I’m saying. I’m just thinking out loud.”

“About what?”

“Just wondering, is all. What the future holds for us. If you even think about it.”

“Sure I have.” He looks at movie release dates for the coming month to decide what they’re going to see, and sometimes he even makes reservations far in advance. That’s as far into their future as he ever plans, but she didn’t specify and he thinks it’s better not to mention it.

“Look,” she says, and he already knows nothing good follows that word unless you’re somewhere scenic, like the Grand Canyon, or a safari. He’s pretty sure he’s not going to hear “Look, a giraffe!” in the middle of his bare bones apartment with no windows. “This is shitty timing, and I was going to talk to you this weekend, but at this point no time is a good time. I was offered an assignment out-of-state, and it’s a really great opportunity for me.”

“Where?”

“New York. The Gray Lady, if you can believe it. Bottom of the ladder, but better pay than I get now with the opportunity to move up.” 

“That’s...fuck, that’s great. That’s really great.” She smiles, ducking her head, but then the smile fades away. “So...you’re dumping me. That’s what’s happening right now? I’m going to help take care of the man who’s been more of a father to me than my own father and you’re dumping me?”

“I was _going _to ask you to come with me.” She picks at the comforter, pulling at imaginary threads so she doesn’t need to look him in the eye. “I was planning to have the Big Talk with you this weekend, see what you thought about moving on from here, making a life somewhere else. With me.” She lets out a breath, leaning back on her hands. “Obviously that can’t happen now, and I understand that. Bobby should come first, absolutely. But I’m taking the job, and I need to figure out what we do about that.”

“Christ.” He looks down at the garbage bag still clutched in one hand, second-hand clothes tumbled haphazardly into it. “I don’t know if I can give you the answer to that right now.”

“Yeah.” She says it softly, an acknowledgement of an answer she already knew. 

“When do they want you to start?” 

“A month. Just after Easter.”

“Okay. We’ll figure something out.” She smiles again, sliding off the bed to wrap her arms around him.

***

Bobby handles being looked after with as much grace as one would expect, which is to say none at all. His speech is still slurred, he has some numbness in one hand, and he is royally pissed about both these things to such a degree that Dean is rather amazed his anger doesn’t just burn them both out of his system.

Dean moves into an upstairs bedroom that hasn’t been used in decades if the dust is any indication, but Cassie helps him clean every surface before he unloads the car, her hair pulled back underneath a bright yellow bandana. Rufus barely even grumbles at the disturbance, even giving them a close-lipped smile as they pass by the kitchen on their way out, drinking a beer and looking as maudlin as usual. Dean pauses as they come back in, letting Cassie go upstairs without him. 

“Are you sure you’re okay with this?”

“Which part? Getting old or needing help?”

“Right. Dumb question.”

“I just hope your cooking is better than mine.” He studies the beer can in his hands, then crushes it in one fist. “Never could manage more than toast.”

“I’ll go grocery shopping when we’re finished, and prove my worth tonight. Deal?”

Rufus nods as he gets up to get another beer, and Dean makes his way back up the stairs, box of DVDs in hand. He leans against the doorframe of the room, watching Cassie make the bed until she finally notices him. The smile she finally sends his way is a sad one, and so is the one he gives her in return. In the years to come, when he looks back on this moment, he’ll realize he already he knew what was inevitable, irrevocable; he knew, but refused to see. 

***

A week later, Dean leaves the shop early and walks down the block to the jewelry store on the corner, and when he leaves two hours later he’s clutching a delicate bag with a bright red velvet box inside, the equivalent to a month’s pay. He sits in the Impala for several minutes, staring at it, then puts it into the glove compartment before he goes home to make dinner for Bobby and Rufus, excusing himself to go Skype with Sam.

“Are you moving home after graduation?”

“No.” Dean can’t even muster the strength to be disappointed anymore. “I miss you, Dean, I do, but…”

“Yeah, I know. It’s just that I’d really like it if my best man were present when I propose to Cassie.”

“What? You’re joking?” The speakers crackle with Sam’s gleeful shouting, and Dean can’t help but smile, even though it feels false, out of place. He’d hope saying it to Sam would help solidify it in his mind, make it feel like the right decision, but he feels hollow instead. “I can’t believe it! Took you long enough. Are you going to move to New York with her?”

“No, Sam. I don’t know. We haven’t...we have a lot of things to figure out first. Bobby still isn’t a hundred percent after the stroke, and they need more help in the shop than ever. Cassie might not even stay there.” 

“You should go with her, Dean. The only reason you’re still in Minnesota is because that’s what Dad decided for us.”

“Come on, Sammy. Things are a lot better for him now, you’d know if you ever came home.”

He can see the muscle in Sam’s jaw clench, even on screen. “You still going over there for dinner every Sunday like a good son?” 

“Jesus Christ, Sam. It’s not about that. They’re our family.”

“_You’re_ my family.”

“And there’s room for more than just me.”

“Cassie will be my family, too, and whatever kids you have,” Sam says firmly. “And you’ll raise them a lot better than we were raised, I know it.” 

“Well, I’m certainly not letting you babysit, unless I want to be chasing another baby through the goblin realm.”

Sam glares at him so hard he thinks his laptop screen might crack, and Dean braces himself. For almost nine years he and Sam have ignored the subject, and Dean wonders if he’s truly forgotten. It’s on the tip of his tongue to tell him the truth about Castiel, about the one night every year that he spends in his company, how sometimes he never wants to leave it. That he thinks he’ll go mad eventually, and marrying Cassie is the only way he can make himself stop thinking about how much he wants to take that gloved hand and never let it go. 

“Don’t you ever mention that to me again. As far as I’m concerned, that never happened. I’ve moved on with my life, and you should, too.”

“I can’t, Sammy.” 

The call disconnects, and Dean stares at the screen where Sam used to be for a long time. 

***

A week before she has to leave for New York, Cassie sits Dean down on the couch in her apartment, surrounded by cardboard boxes labelled in her neat script: _Kitchen, Reference Books, Bedroom, Linens. _He thinks about the ring in its bright red box, tucked in the pocket of his jacket, hanging on a hook by the door. His palms are sweating, and he wipes them nervously on his jeans as he sits on the couch. Cassie’s eyes track the movement and he stops, trying to look casual, unaffected.

“I don’t want you to feel pressured to make a decision right now,” she says, looking him in the eye as she sits sideways and cross-legged on the far cushion, elbows on her knees, as though they’re talking about what movie they want to see instead of the end of everything they’ve been. “Honestly, I’ve been doing a lot of thinking these last few weeks.”

“About?”

“About whether or not we’re even endgame.” 

“Yeah, I’ve been thinking about that a lot, too.” This is the moment he should act. He should cross the room and get out the box, fall on one knee in front of her, ask the question. He should. But he doesn’t.

“I care about you, Dean, but I sometimes I wonder if I even know you at all. You still never talk about your childhood unless you have to clarify something that comes up during dinner at your dad’s house, you pretend it doesn’t bother you that Sam never comes home even though I can tell that it does, and dozens of other things besides. It’s like you have a bunch of little secrets that you keep to yourself, or just one really big one. I can’t decide.” She props her chin on one hand, waiting for a response, then sighs when he says nothing. “I just feel like people who’ve been together as long as we have should know these kinds of things about one another, especially if they’re thinking about a future together. Unless they _aren’t_ thinking about a future together.” 

“Cassie, I…”

“Don’t.” 

“I want to tell you about all those things; well, no, actually, I _don’t _want to, but I know that I should. If we want to have a future together, I need to tell you the truth about me. I need to tell you about, about…” He takes several deep breaths. It’s hard, so hard to get the words past his lips. He wonders how to even begin, and that first night with Castiel flashes into his mind. _ Start at the beginning. _“You see, I…”

“Is this about what happened when you and Sam were kids?” she interrupts softly with a face full of pity. “It’s okay if it’s too hard to talk about. I already know.”

“You...you _know_?”

“I’m an investigative journalist, Dean, I did the research. It was only difficult when I was just looking into you or Sam, since you have barely any school records before coming to Minnesota. Once I decided to follow up on John instead, it was a lot easier to follow the trail.”

“You…” Of course. “You looked into my childhood?”

“You would never tell me anything,” she says reasonably. “It seemed like the best solution before I invested too much time into our relationship.” 

“Invested. Time.” If she can hear that he says it through gritted teeth, she shows no sign of it. “How much do you actually know?”

“I know what happened to your mom, and how your dad eventually got a job that took you from place to place most of the year, which is why all your records are so strange. I know about all the times he spent the night in jail drying out after an incident in some bar, and, well.”

“You know that I got picked up for shoplifting when I was twelve.”

“Yes.” He puts his head in his hands, blinking back the frustration. “I understand why you did it.”

“Oh, you _understand,_” he says, and she blinks at the venom in his voice. “Tell me what you understand about it.”

“You were just a kid. Kids do stupid things, try to rebel, it’s just a normal...”

“Normal.” He laughs, crossing his arms to lean back against the couch. “You got me there. Normal act of teenage rebellion, that’s all it was. Dad forgot to leave money for us that week when he abandoned us in the motel, and we hadn’t seen him in two days. Didn’t know at the time he’d been thrown in the drunk tank for the weekend, only that Sammy was crying because he was hungry, and I thought ‘you know what? This is the perfect time for some good old-fashioned teenage rebellion.’ So I walked two miles to the grocery store, thinking I’d have a better shot in a bigger place. Only I didn’t think about how far I’d have to go to get back, or that I’d stick out like a sore thumb walking down the highway with two boxes of Froot Loops. No, all I could think about was how I was going to take care of Sammy if Dad never came back.”

“I didn’t realize,” she says in a whisper. He does stand up now, pacing the length of the room, arms still crossed, unable to look at the apology on her face.

“No, you didn’t, but you _thought _you did. You looked at all those pieces and decided you understood me, and that I was still worth the _investment_, for whatever reason.” 

“Because I see how far you’ve come, and what a good man you are because you don’t let yourself be affected by the past! That’s why you still maintain a relationship with your dad.”

“I don’t drag myself to dinner with John Winchester Family Take Two every Sunday because I’ve _forgiven _him, sweetheart. I do it because he would like nothing more than to forget about every mistake he ever made with me and Sam, so he can pretend that his storybook life with Kate and Adam is the only one he’s ever had. It would be so easy on him if I went away, too, off to New York with you to build a brand new life just like Sam has. Then he’d never again have to look me in the face and see all the ways he was a failure reflected back at him.”

“I never realized you hated him so much.”

“I don’t.”

He stops moving, breathing hard, and he doesn’t hear her get up from the couch until she leans against him, wrapping her arms around his waist. “I’m sorry that you went through all that, I am. It doesn’t matter to me, Dean. All I want to think about is our future. Isn’t it better that I know everything?”

“It wasn’t for you to decide when or if that would happen,” he says, pulling her arms off him as he steps away. “Enjoy New York.”

“Dean, wait…”

“We’re done here.” He grabs his jacket as he heads for the door, throwing it into the backseat of the Impala before he drives away, its contents forgotten.

*******

The room Castiel finds himself in is not Dean’s apartment, nor does it resemble the apartment he’d surprised Dean in once before. He braces himself even so as he glances around for another occupant, wary of letting Dean see his jealousy or resentment.

“Hey, Cas.” Dean is sitting curled up in a ball on the bed, arms around his knees, head tilted back against the headboard. “Been waiting for you.”

“Have you now?” Excitement flares up but he tamps it down. It likely means that Dean has been having a hard time and just wants to get away, and escape for the night to a mystical realm is something he’s come to enjoy over the years. “Then let’s not dawdle.” 

Dean slides off the bed as Castiel puts out a hand, but he hesitates before taking it. “Could we just…” His eyes flicker to the bed, then back to Castiel’s hand. “Sorry, never mind. I forgot.” Castiel tilts his head, questioning, but Dean grips his hand firmly and doesn’t say anything else until they’ve emerged into the latest creation. 

It’s his most ambitious creation yet, an underwater seascape that took months for him to perfect, like being in a glass bubble fathoms deep in the midst of an aquatic garden full of life. Dean squeezes tighter as he takes in their surroundings, and Castiel has a moment of regret when he realizes how disorienting it must be to think for a moment that you won’t be able to breathe before finding out your lungs work just fine. He waits for Dean to say something as a stingray moves over their head, the passage of its shadow looming large, but he says nothing even as his eyes follow it with wide-eyed wonder.

“You don’t seem like yourself,” Castiel observes when Dean doesn’t immediately drop his hand, still staring out at the vast ocean all around them, phosphorescent sea life aglow like lanterns in the dark. “What is the matter?”

“I don’t even know where to start.”

“Start at the beginning.” Dean takes a deep breath, pulling Castiel closer, and he doesn’t realize what’s happening until Dean is kissing him, warm and rich and everything he’s been longing for ever since the first night he brought him to this side of the veil. His arms come up, pressing their bodies together, but suddenly Dean breaks off and jerks away, turning his back to Castiel with a gasp.

“I’m sorry,” he says, breathless, and all Castiel can think is that he wants him to sound like that forever.

“For kissing me or for stopping? Because you should only be apologizing for one of those.” He comes up behind him, placing his hands on his shoulders, nuzzling at his throat, and Dean leans his head back against Castiel’s shoulder. “I forgive you. Now kiss me again.”

“I can’t.”

“Yes, of course.” He steps away, calming his racing heart. “I’ve forgotten about your Cassie.”

“No, it’s not...it’s not her.”

“Is there another impediment that prevents me from making love to you right now, since it seems obvious that’s what you want me to do?” He takes a step closer, and Dean’s eyes darken. 

“What about Balthazar?”

“What about him?”

“Won’t he be angry if we do this?” 

He cups Dean’s face, lifting his chin. “Balthazar does not get a say.”

Dean swallows hard, blinking a few times. “But...” Castiel silences him with another kiss, and it’s as though a dam he’s been building for years has finally burst. Every aborted touch, every desired caress, all of them finally unfettered and free as he delves into that sinful mouth. Dean makes a noise of surrender, and Castiel lowers him gently onto the sand, torn between using magic to remove his clothes with a snap or unwrapping him slowly, like a gift he’s been waiting to open for years. It gives him pause, and he pulls away to look down at Dean’s flushed face, curious.

“Why now? After all this time?”

“Does it matter?”

“Of course it matters.” He traces one cheekbone with a gloved finger, drawing it over a kiss-swollen lower lip. “You matter to me, Dean.”

“I know,” he says huskily. “That’s why.”

Castiel has so many questions, but it’s hard to remember them all with Dean beneath him, pliant and eager the way he’s wanted him for so long. “Let me show you how much.”

***

Many hours later, they lie together in Castiel’s vast bed in his castle room, skin against skin as their naked limbs tangle together amongst the scattered bedclothes. Dean is tracing the tip of a single finger over the planes of Castiel’s chest, circling a nipple as it passes, then skimming along the ribs and back up again. Castiel hums with pleasure, sated for the moment but still hungry. Never before has he tasted a lover and wanted more of them, desired to sink into them for days on end and learn every means at his disposal to bring them pleasure. _Had we but world enough and time, _he thinks,remembering a favored line from that long-ago time when the fae still interacted with humanity. _And so we do, and I have. _

“What happens now?” Dean asks, curling closer, letting his hand roam lower, thumb rubbing a warm circle into Castiel’s hip. 

“I’m still sifting through half a dozen ideas, I just need a few more moments.” 

“No,” Dean laughs, propping his head on one hand while using the other to cup Castiel’s once-again interested member briefly before moving up to his stomach, stroking idly. “I mean with our arrangement.”

_So this is his plan_, Castiel thinks. The sudden absence of the afterglow he’s been enjoying leaves him cold, and the hand that’s been stroking up and down Dean’s spine stills. “Nothing happens with our arrangement. It remains as it is.”

“Oh,” Dean says sadly, and Castiel squeezes his eyes shut. He knows that physical attraction is not the same as romantic feeling, and he should not have allowed himself to hope. His heart feels like an organ exposed, tender to the touch and trembling in the open air. 

“You knew the terms when you agreed to them.” 

Dean laughs lightly, and Castiel opens his eyes in surprise. “You know, I was terrified of you when we first met.” 

“Yes, you cowered before me as I recall. I _was_ frightening.”

“I had no idea what you wanted from me.”

“I thought it was obvious.” He rolls Dean onto his back, pinning him beneath him in a move reminiscent of another long ago, only this time he lowers himself carefully, pressing their bodies together so that Dean gasps. “I wanted _this.”_

“Yes, that exactly.” Dean groans, throwing his head back, and Castiel nips lightly at the skin of his throat as Dean palms his ass, pulling him closer. Castiel takes his wrists, moving them above his head, then twines their fingers together to look deep into the eyes that have haunted him every day since he first saw them. 

“Would you bind yourself to me further?” He grinds their hips together, and Dean groans deliciously beneath him. “Give up your life on earth to come here as my pet?” He can’t help the secret desire from tumbling out of him, the fantasy that Dean would leave all of humanity behind, including the brothers he was so desperate to save. He imagines Dean going to endless masquerades while the rest of the fae vie for his attention, competing with one another to seduce him away from Castiel; Rachel’s smug face as she dances with him under Castiel’s nose, whispering in his ear, pressing herself lasciviously against him. Suddenly the image loses its appeal, and he stills, giving up the advantage.

Dean rolls them easily, reversing their positions, then sitting back to straddle his hips. “I told you before that you have no power over me.”

“None, except that which you give willingly.”

Dean smiles, his eyes alight, and in them the true kingdom Castiel wishes he were beholden to. He gazes up at his human god and thinks, _there is nothing to rival this in all the realms of faerie_. So he will take this, if it is all Dean is willing to give, one night each year for the rest of forever.


	7. Chapter 7

“She wasn’t right for you, you know.” There’s still a bit of lag in Bobby’s speech, but Dean understands him just fine even though he wasn’t paying attention. All week he’s been distracted, hands on whatever he’s doing while his mind floats far afield, thinking of blue eyes and long fingers and Castiel, always Castiel, hovering on the edge of his consciousness.

It had been a shock to wake the next morning alone in his bed, sated and pleasantly sore, feeling Castiel’s absence beside him like a black hole, all the buoyant joy inside him slipping past its event horizon.

“I thought you liked her.” Dean made a pie after dinner that’s now baking in the oven, filling the kitchen with its comforting scent, and now he’s washing the dishes. Bobby sits at the table, doing his hand exercises and cussing under his breath as Dean finishes the last plate. He shuts off the water before he grabs each of them a beer and slides into the chair across from him, pulling Bobby’s away as he reaches for it. “Uh-uh. One more set, _then _beer.”

Bobby glares at him as he dutifully does the last of his stretches, sighing in relief when the cool glass of the bottle hits the palm of his tired hand.

“I liked her well enough. I just didn’t like where I thought it was going.”

“Why’s that?” He expects Bobby to shrug and change the subject, but he looks pensive, staring at the bottle for a few minutes. “You never said anything.”

“No, I suppose I didn’t.” He takes a long draught from the brown bottle, then sets it aside to lean on the table. “It’s just that you ain’t exactly a social butterfly, so it was nice you found someone to keep company with, I guess. I didn’t think it would last so long, is all. It seemed like…”

“Like what?”

“Like you couldn’t have what you really wanted, so you were gonna settle for the next best thing.”

“Christ.” 

“I don’t think it was mean-spirited. It was good that you finally found someone to help you get past Sam leaving. It’s hard when you and another person have always depended on each other, and then they’re gone.”

“Was that what it was like for you?” he asks tentatively, not knowing how Bobby will feel about him broaching the subject. 

Bobby doesn’t answer for a while, and Dean doesn’t press as they sit quietly and sip their beers. Rufus has never said another word to Dean about what they discussed the night Bobby had his stroke, sitting in shitty plastic chairs in the nondescript hospital lounge, but Dean thinks about it every time he looks at the both of them. He’s beginning to regret saying anything when Bobby clears his throat. 

“My wife, Karen. We got married young, right out of high school, like a lot of folks in those days. For twenty-two years she was my constant: she was there when I slept and when I woke, she took care of what I wore and what I ate. It got to be that I couldn’t remember what life was like without her, and then she was just gone. Car accident. Drunk driver.”

“Yeah, um. Rufus, he told me a little bit. About how you met.”

“I’d like to tell you he’s been warped by grief and circumstance, but truth be told he was a son-of-a-bitch even then.” Bobby laughs, light and easy despite the subject, and Dean cracks a grin. “I had to learn to live in a world without my legs and without Karen, and he had his own crosses to bear. It took a while, but we helped each other get past it -- and then we stopped hoping for anything else. Now we’re a couple of washed up old men, racing each other to the grave as slowly as possible.”

“He was so pissed at you in the hospital for pulling out in front.”

“I bet. He doesn’t want to have to do all the work when I’m gone.” Dean laughs with him this time, and then Bobby grows serious. “Anyway, I’m glad you met Cassie, because she helped you stop wondering who you were without Sam to take care of, without feeling like the third wheel to your dad’s chance at paternal redemption. But I always felt like you two didn’t really see each other for what you were.”

_Isn’t it better that I know everything? _Cassie had said, thinking that whatever she found on paper was the sum of all his parts. That he never expected she would do such a thing says everything about how well he knew her, too.

“You’re right about that.”

“I know.” Bobby grins at him as Rufus enters and crosses to the fridge to get a beer of his own.

“What are you two fools grinning about?” he grumbles, sitting at the head of the table between the two of them.

“Just making sure Dean knows which one of us is the font of all wisdom around here.”

“Oh, he doesn’t need you to tell him I’m the superior mind in this house. He can see it for himself. He’s almost as smart as I am.” 

Dean shakes his head as they start arguing just as the oven timer starts beeping, and he gets up from the table to turn it off just as the phone on the wall starts to ring. Bobby picks it up with his standard gruff greeting, then says nothing as Dean gingerly takes out the pie, placing it carefully on the stovetop before he turns back around to see Bobby as white as a sheet.

“We’ll be there as soon as we can,” he says before he hangs up, and Dean feels a chill in his bones. 

_You look like a goose walked over your grave._

“Sam?” he manages to croak out. He’s supposed to graduate in a month, and Dean is suddenly paralyzed with fear that he’ll never see him again. His shoulders sag in relief when Bobby shakes his head. 

“We’ve got to get to the hospital. There was an accident.”

“Dad?” 

“All of them.”

***

The brothers stay at the graveside for a long time after they've lowered the smallest casket of the three into the ground, a summer rainstorm soaking their clothes despite the large black umbrellas above their heads. Bobby waits at the house for the crowd of the bereaved, the muddy terrain more difficult for him to traverse than a bunch of grieving strangers he’s never met. Sam turns away before Dean, following the muddy path cut by the feet of a dozen other mourners undeterred by the rain; all of them friends of Kate's -- with the exception of Rufus, who'd stood apart but was there for them nonetheless. 

John Winchester managed to kill himself and his small family while on the way home from a charity banquet trying to raise money for the hospital where Kate worked; the same hospital where they died after being cut out of their car. Dean was not surprised to learn he’d once again fallen short of getting his one year chip in AA. Kate had never lost hope, swearing each time that he made it a little bit longer, that once he got to that point it would stick -- but her optimism got her killed, along with the little brother Dean and Sam had once worked so hard to save. 

Adam was ten years old, but now he’ll never see eleven, only the ivory silk on the inside of a coffin. He’d been buried in the little league uniform that Dean had washed and pressed, starched with tears when there was no one else to see.

Sam had arrived late last night and Dean barely even recognized him, despite the years of talking over Skype. 

“Christ, please tell me you’ve finally finished growing,” he’d choked out as Sam pulled him into a hug in the middle of the airport, whispering apologies over and over as he clutched the back of his shirt.

They’ve barely spoken today, the weight of all they have to do pressing on their tongues, and he can’t bring himself to go back to the house to face the eventuality that Sam will leave again soon, and he’ll truly be alone. 

He stands there with his hands shoved into the pockets of his long black coat, head bared to the elements, listening to the rain patter against the surrounding monuments and watching it pool into the corners of the green tarp, discreetly hiding displaced dirt that would soon cover up the last family they had left. He shivers, turning to follow in Sam’s footsteps when he catches a glimpse of someone else on the far side of the lot: a lone figure in a belted tan trenchcoat, collar turned up against the rain, a pair of sunglasses hiding their features. He can’t make out who it is at this distance, but they’re staring in his direction. He could swear their clothes are completely dry even though they don’t have an umbrella, and he tries to blink the rain out of his eyes to get a closer look.

“Dean?” It’s the last voice he expected to hear today, drawing his attention back to the nearby access road where he’d parked the Impala.

“What are you doing here?”

“I couldn’t get a flight until this morning,” Cassie says, shoulders hunched beneath a black umbrella. “I tried to get here as soon as I heard. I’m so sorry.”

She comes close enough to wrap an arm around his waist, holding the umbrella above them both, heedless of the way his drenched coat soaks the sleeveless black dress she wears. For a moment he holds firm, all the things that went wrong between them stiffening his spine, but the comfort of the familiar wins in the end; he wraps his arms around her shoulders, burying his face in the curls of her hair, and lets himself be held. 

He doesn’t know how long they stand there, but eventually she shivers against him and he comes back to himself. He opens the passenger door of the Impala for her before going around to the driver’s side, starting the engine and turning on the heat as she shivers beside him. He grabs his leather jacket from the backseat and drapes it around her shoulders, pulling back as far as he can when she slips her arms into the sleeves and pulls it tightly around her.

“How did you get here?” The Impala is the only car parked on the access road. 

“My parents. They wanted to come to the services this morning, but we didn’t get back from the airport in time. We got here just as it was ending, so I asked them to just drop me here. I’m sorry if that was presumptuous.”

“Banking on my chivalry to make me talk to you?”

She looks out the window but doesn’t deny it, and he supposes if he were a different person he’d leave her here in the rain to think about manipulating people while they’re grieving -- but she knows that he’s not, and she was counting on it.

“Are you glad that he’s dead?” 

“Glad? No. He was my dad. He was terrible at it, and there were a lot of ways I wanted him to pay for it, but not like this. Not at the expense of Kate and Adam. Not even at his own.”

“Was it…”

“Quick?” She nods, not looking at him. “Yes. Instantaneous.” He doesn’t know why she deserves this small comfort he can’t enjoy for himself, but he gives it without thinking, just like he did for all the other strangers who pressed his hand today and told him how sorry they were; that’s all Cassie is to him now, some stranger he thought he loved. She shivers, shoving her hands into the pockets, and it’s only at that moment that he remembers what’s in them. 

She pulls out the bright red box, staring at it for a few minutes, then opening the lid to look at the ring inside. It flashes, even in the car interior darkened by the rain, and she takes a deep breath.

“I’m so sorry, Dean. I wish I’d been here.”

“It wouldn’t have mattered.”

“No, I mean, I wish we hadn’t…”

“Don’t.”

“Please,” she says plaintively. He looks away, focusing on the field of grey tombstones through the rivulets running down the glass, wondering where the strange figure he’d spotted before went. “Could we try again?”

“No.”

“Just like that? You’ve decided for both of us and I have to accept it?”

He leans over and plucks the box out of her hand, closing it into his fist. 

“Yes. Exactly the way you decided for both of us that my past was your business whether I was ready to share it or not.” He puts the car in drive, slowly pulling into the center of the asphalt, not looking at her as he navigates his way out of the cemetery. “We can’t ever go back, even if I wanted to.”

“We had so many good times together, Dean. We could again, if you gave me a chance to make it up to you.”

“I don’t want to.”

“But…” 

“I don’t want _you_,” he says firmly, making a left out of the cemetery and keeping his eyes on the road. “And I’m glad I figured that out before I made a huge mistake.” 

Neither of them speaks for a while, the only sound the slap of the windshield wipers and the click of the turn signal. She looks firmly out the window until he turns onto the street where her parents live, backing his car into the driveway so she’s closer to the front door, unable to check his chivalry even now. She takes a shuddering breath, sliding out of his jacket, and he puts a hand on her arm before she opens the door. 

“Thank you for coming, really. You didn’t have to.”

She nods, eyes glistening, and covers his hand with her own to give it a squeeze. 

“I really am sorry.” The door creaks loudly as she pushes against it and steps out into the rain, eschewing her umbrella as she jogs to the door, and he doesn’t know if she turns to look back at him as he drives away.

When he returns to John and Kate’s neighborhood he parks at the end of the block, staring at the line of cars along the street, then glances at the jacket pooled on the passenger seat. It had been John’s, long ago, and Dean had rescued it from the back of the hall closet when he’d moved out after graduation; it’s been in the back seat since he broke up with Cassie. He opens the velvet box, trying to remember what he was feeling when he bought it.

He thinks of the cigar box back at Bobby’s house, tucked into the drawer of his nightstand now, its worthless contents the sum total of his life: a very few fragile and faded childhood photos, the first tooth Sam had lost, a card that Adam had made in first grade. Ticket stubs from movies with Charlie, a piece of fragrant sandalwood, a tightly folded cupcake wrapper. 

All things he wants to remember, and none of them connect to Cassie. Not like the bright green leaf still fresh years later, a tuft of golden cloud, a river rock like a diamond, and a discarded leather glove that he’d taken off with his teeth and tucked into the back pocket of his jeans.

The contents of the cigar box have no worldly value, but they’re worth more than what Dean has clenched in his fist. He tosses it in the glove compartment without ceremony before he gets out of the car, holding the jacket above his head against the rain as he runs to the house. 

***

None of the mourners stay at the wake very long, as awkward around Dean and Sam as they are around so many strangers. Bobby and Rufus stay long enough to help them put away the food and tidy up the house; Dean sees them both out the door as Sam finishes drying the dishes, clapping Rufus brusquely on the back and shaking Bobby’s outstretched hand. 

“I didn’t see your friend here, did they find you at the cemetery?” Bobby asks as Rufus gets the car started. 

“Yeah.” 

Bobby just nods, like he senses there’s more to it that Dean doesn’t want to discuss, which is true. He helps Bobby into the car, then stows the wheelchair in the trunk before moving away as Rufus throws the car into reverse. He stands in the driveway as they pull away, hands in his pockets as he listens to the sound of the tires on the wet street, the rain over but the air still thick with humidity in the coming dark. 

He walks down the street to retrieve the Impala and pull it up to the house, then lingers in the front seat with the engine off, wishing Charlie were here, but he refused to let her drop everything to fly home a week before she has to present her master’s thesis. He’d tried that excuse with Sam the night he’d called him with the news, knowing he was a couple of weeks away from finals; Sam had nodded in agreement as they spoke and then sent Dean a text the next day with his flight information and no additional comment.

Now he finds himself dreading an evening alone with him, unwilling to face the fact that they’re now strangers, too.

He puts his forehead on the steering wheel and takes a few deep breaths. Not for the first time he wishes for a way to reach out to Castiel, to talk to him, to not have to face this long night and all those in the coming year without him. _If you can get through this night, you can get through the next year alone,_ he tells himself. 

He takes the duffel bag out of his trunk and lets himself back into the house, dropping it onto the bottom stair as he passes it on his way to the kitchen.

Sam is sitting alone at the table with his face in his hands, two empty tumblers and a bottle of Johnnie Walker Red in front of him. He’s already changed into a worn pair of jeans and a tattered grey sweatshirt, fraying at the cuffs. He looks up as Dean enters, sliding into the opposite chair and giving the label a cursory glance before his eyes move to the _Stanford_ in red block letters across his brother’s chest.

“It’s just the first that I found,” Sam explains. “I’m pretty sure if we went looking we’d find some more.” 

Dean places it back on the table, considering. “Maybe we should look for it all first. Then we can just finish it without having to drunkenly navigate the stairs.”

“Yeah. I think I’ve maxed out on my alcohol-related accidents for the year. You want to go change? You can start upstairs, I’ll check the garage and work my way through this floor.”

“Deal.” It’s a reprieve from the inevitable, and more liquor will definitely be necessary. He takes his duffel upstairs to Sam’s old room, the twin beds unchanged since the day Sam left, and changes quickly. It takes him less than ten minutes to find two half-filled bottles of whiskey in the room, one tucked between the headboard of Dean’s old bed and the wall, the other in the far back corner of the top shelf in the closet. He places them at the top of the stairs, then stands in the doorway of Adam’s room and flicks on the light.

He’d come in here briefly, less than a week ago, grabbing Adam’s crumpled uniform from the floor. He’d had a game the morning of the accident, only the second or third of the season, and he’d quickly changed clothes to go to a teammate’s house for the evening. Kate probably didn’t want to be late, told him he’d better clean his room tomorrow, because how could she have imagined that tomorrow wouldn’t come?

Dean imagines that Adam spent his last night alive playing Mario Kart with his friends, drinking Kool-Aid and eating pretzel sticks out of the bag -- before his parents stopped on their way home to pick him up, his mom’s hair a little unkempt, his dad disheveled and drunk and absolutely insistent that he could handle it.

He doesn’t find any hidden bottles in Adam’s room, and for that he feels a gratitude that John will never know about, nor deserve. The bathroom yields another mostly empty bottle, rolled into a beach towel and placed in the middle of a stack on an upper shelf, and he places it at the top of the stairs with the others before he goes into the master bedroom. The French doors are still the same, and he can see the brick wall of the neighbor’s house across the way, longing for a different view -- a maze with a castle at the center, and within it the only thing Dean wants right now, the only source of comfort he can imagine. He finds nothing until he gets to the closet, but instead of alcohol he discovers a shoe box he doesn’t expect. He only looks at the contents for a few moments before taking it with him, gathering his other bounty to his chest before making his way back to the kitchen.

There’s only one more bottle on the table where Sam sits. “Garage, underneath the tray in his toolbox. I see you had more luck.” They arrange all the bottles in a line from least full to unopened. “Christ, I wish he’d at least bought Black Label. What’s in the box?”

Dean says nothing as he pushes it towards him, instead taking the glasses and filling them up, emptying out the meager contents of the first bottle as Sam pulls off the lid. He stares silently at the contents for a few minutes, then takes the glass Dean gives him with a shaky hand, throwing back the liquid with a grimace and holding it out for a refill.

He pulls out a thin piece of paper, staring at the type on the front as Dean obliges him with a fresh drink. “This is my senior report card,” he whispers, placing it on the table where Dean can see columns of grades, upside down but unmistakable as A after A. He removes another, placing at over the first, then another: junior year, sophomore, freshman, eighth grade. Under that is Dean’s senior report card, not nearly as stellar as Sam’s but not bad, all things considered. Sam takes out a host of other things, too, lining them up along the table. Dean wonders if it’s an unspoken family tradition, this gathering of tiny treasures hoarded in a worthless box from something they’ve never used and hidden away somewhere: cigars for one who doesn’t smoke, sneakers for one who doesn’t run. He wonders what Sam has at home, tucked under his bed, holding his own Precious Artifacts of No Inherent Value.

An old pacifier Dean doesn’t recognize and a baby sock he does. Three locks of hair, blond and dark blonde and brown, each in a large curl tied off at one end with a bit of string and wrapped in a piece of fragile tissue paper. Pictures, faded with age and worn along the edges, and Sam stares at one of the four of them for a long time. It’s the closest they’ll ever get to John Winchester telling them he loved them, silently, with a shoebox. 

“Do you think Dad was cursed?” Sam asks softly, putting the picture down alongside the others. They’ve finished the second bottle that had only been a quarter full, and are working on the third, which has half its contents, and Dean is pouring. 

“I think Dad had shitty coping skills.”

“Yeah.” Sam stares moodily into his glass. “I guess we both did.”

“How so? You seem to be coping just fine.”

Sam laughs, shaking his head, rubbing his face with his hands before giving Dean a serious look. “I don’t know if running away from your problems is a coping mechanism.” 

“I thought you were running _toward _a better life for yourself. Full ride to Stanford, all new life in California, maybe law school if you don’t fail all the final exams you have to take when you go back…”

“I hate it.”

“What?”

“No, I mean. California is nice, all the people I know are great, and I like going to class, but I just feel like I’m not myself there. Nobody knows anything about my childhood, or why I am the way I am. I thought it would be great to write my own story, control what everyone thought about who I was. It’s not really that great. It’s...lonely.”

“But you have tons of friends! You would always tell me all about them, and all the study groups and get-togethers and parties…”

“I have a ton of _acquaintances_ but I don’t know if I’d consider any of them friends. There isn’t a single person among them that I ever felt I could come clean with, not one. Not even because I thought it would change the way they look at me, but because I just didn’t think they would care. Now I feel like we’ve grown apart, because it was so important to me to prove that I could do great on my own, you know? And I felt like if I came home you’d know. You’d be able to see right through me, and I’d come home a total failure.”

“Sam…”

“I miss you, Dean. I missed Adam, and Kate, and hell, even Dad sometimes. He was a bastard in a lot of ways, but he was my age when I was born, and your age when Mom died, you know? How the hell would we have managed in similar circumstances?” Sam grabs the last two bottles, still pristine, and twists them both open. He places one in front of Dean and takes a swig directly from the other. “Let’s drink until we stop being sad.”

“I don’t know if this is going to be enough.”

“Then let’s drink until we pass out,” Sam says, holding up his bottle. Dean clinks it with his own, and they get to work.

At some point they move into the living room, Dean splayed across the couch, Sam flat on his back on the loveseat with his legs slung over the armrest and feet still touching the floor. They’ve reached the slurred philosophy phase of the evening, and Sam is waving one arm wildly in the air as he speaks. Dean can barely follow what he’s saying, drifting in a fog.

“Do you think Adam would have been better off if we’d left him there?” 

“What?” He sits up, feeling suddenly sober and alert.

“In the castle,” Sam says easily, matter-of-fact, like it’s a discussion they have regularly. “We should have let that king dude keep him, and he’d probably still believe. No. Be alive. Yeah. What was his name? Castle. No, that was the building.” Dean holds his breath, wondering what will happen if Sam says the name out loud. Until now, he wasn’t even sure that he knew it. “Cassiel? Carriel? Carry on?” He giggles, belting into fragments of song and then trailing off, somber again, then turning his head to look at Dean. “We should have left him there.”

“No, Sam.” He shakes his head. “He would have turned into a goblin.”

“Holy shit, how do you know?” 

Dean takes a swig from the bottle still clutched in one hand, then lets his head fall back against the couch.

“That’s what happens to all the little children who go there. The goblin king told me himself.” 

“What? When?”

“There’s something I never told you,” he says slowly, figuring if Sam’s drunk enough to talk about this on his own, he’s drunk enough to tell the truth. He keeps his eyes on the ceiling, because he can’t look at him while he does this. “I had to make a deal, to get you and Adam out of there. I don’t know why I did it. I was desperate, I think, because I needed to protect you both, to get you home; but I was intrigued, too. Fascinated by him. A lot of other emotions I couldn’t even name at the time: frightened, intimidated, aroused.” He laughs a bit, taking another drink. “Maybe I still feel all of those things, I don’t know, but I feel other things, too. Things I never felt with Cassie. I thought that because it was so easy for us to be together we could build a life on that, just pleasantly passing the time together day after day. I never told her anything about growing up, either, I don’t know why. I just never felt like she needed to know. Which should have been a clue, right? I mean, I told Charlie pretty soon after we became friends, because I wanted her to know the real me, and I did the same thing with Castiel. Why did I do that? I told him _everything_. At first I thought I was doing it so he’d get bored and leave me alone, but then I told him because of the way he listened, like he really wanted to know everything about me.” He rubs the bridge of his nose with his free hand, trying to ignore the prickle in the corners of his eyes. “Christ, I wish he was here, Sam, you don’t even know. It’s so fucking strange, but I really care about him. More than I did for Cassie, and I know that’s all kinds of fucked up, I mean, I was going to ask her to marry me, I bought a ring and everything, but I was never half as interested in anything she had to say as I am with him, you know? I really wish I could talk to him right now, because I’m confused about how we left things and I don’t want him to regret it, I hate to think I made him cheat on his boyfriend and now he’s sorry we slept together. And I hate that I just buried three people I love and all I can think is that I wish he was here because it would make me feel better. Anyway, I know I’m just fucking rambling, but he told me all about how the children that get taken there eventually turn into goblins, they never really grow up, that’s why they’re so childish.” 

He finally manages to stop, waiting for Sam’s reaction to anything he’s said, everything, wondering what he’ll say, if he’ll be mad...and there’s a low, guttural snore from the loveseat. Dean turns his head, slowly.

“Sam?” No answer, just a pause before there’s another snore. “Fuck my life, you didn’t hear any of that, did you? Now I’m going to have to do it all again in the morning.”

He doesn’t know how long after that he passes out, but morning is actually afternoon by the time they’re awake enough to move, stiff and sore and full of regrets, and Dean can’t bring himself to repeat any of the things Sam never heard the night before.

“I got into Northwestern, for law school,” Sam says as Dean drives him back to the airport. 

“I thought you’d stay at Stanford,” Dean says. 

“I got accepted, but...I miss you, Dean. I don’t want to ignore the only family I have left until it’s too late for us to be one anymore. I kept thinking that if I stayed away long enough I’d stop wanting that, or at least stop being so mad at Dad for everything so we could try again. But now it’s too late.” 

Dean thinks about the night he spent with Castiel, how he’d been willing to stay there forever, leave Sam and everyone else behind. How he still would. He tightens his hands on the steering wheel. He can’t do that to Sam, not now. Not ever. There has to be another way. “So, Chicago?”

“I’ll still be six or seven hours away, but...I’d like to come and spend the holidays with you. Have you come and visit. Introduce you as my brother.” 

“Yeah,” he agrees softly. “I’d like that.”

“You think there’s room on the couch for me at Rufus and Bobby’s house?” 

“More than that damn loveseat.”


	8. Chapter 8

**__**_Five years later_.

Dean startles awake with a gasp, flailing at the single sheet that covers him as though it's a hundred hands grasping all of him at once. He bolts upright, clutching his chest and panting hard as he takes in the room around him, the dark grey shapes in the predawn light transforming into familiar objects as he breathes in through his nose and out through pursed lips.

"I'm in my room," he says aloud, "I'm in my bed. There is no one here but me." The last sentence is laced with disappointment, and he tries not to think about why. He whispers the mantra to himself over and over as he takes deep breaths, working to calm his racing heart. There was a time, years ago, when he would frequently wake from dreams with his blood elevated, trying to catch his breath. _Not from fear_, he thinks as he wipes the crust from his eyes. 

He swings his legs off the bed, glancing at the clock on the nightstand as he plants his feet on the chilly floor. Not even six a.m., far too early to be awake on any day, much less a Saturday. He sighs, rubbing his face with both hands, rasping over stubble with his palms before he finally stands and shuffles out of the room. The coffee is programmed to start brewing at half past seven, but given the hour he hits the button to get it started before making his way to the bathroom. 

He stares at his reflection in the mirror as he brushes his teeth, telling himself to leave the stubble as is because it looks dashing, not because his hands are still shaking as he grabs his toothbrush. 

_Hands_. 

He shudders, a fragment of the dream returning to him, a multitude of hands clutching at his body before dropping him into the darkness. 

"Just a dream," he whispers. Only a figment of his imagination, again, the way the nightmares always are, but it's only here that none of it is real, in this empty house with the weak light of predawn filtering through the blinds. He knows that somewhere, in another realm, all the denizens of his dreams are real -- and at the center of it all, a single figure holds court.

"Why didn’t you come back?" 

He clutches the lip of the sink as he waits for an answer that doesn't come.

*******

Four hours, one large breakfast, several infomercials and three cups of coffee later find him covered in sawdust and hard at work when there are footsteps in the house. He's not alarmed, though. He knows the heavy tread of that step, even if he rarely hears it anymore. 

"Hey Dean, you here?" 

"In the basement!"

He can hear his brother groan from up in the kitchen, and he grins to himself. Navigating the narrow stairs with low head clearance is something that Dean is used to, but it's much more difficult for his brother, who doesn't do it every day and is several inches taller to boot. He tries not to laugh outright at Sam crawling down the stairs backwards on his hands and knees like a child afraid of falling into the dark, until he reaches the bottom and ducks into the space where Dean is working, the ceiling blessedly clearing his head by an entire inch. 

"How can you work down here? It feels so..._claustrophobic." _

Dean shrugs, glancing at the opposite side of the basement, where a set of steps meet storm doors that open into the backyard, another way out that eases any anxiety over the confined space. "Best place to work, honestly. Wood shavings and all the dust in the air would get all over the house if I used the spare room."

"You could make a mess in the garage."

"I'm not going to soil my baby's home, either." He puts a hand on his chest and gives Sam a look of mock outrage that makes him laugh and shake his head, hands on his hips. Dean goes back to his task, methodically carving a bead into a long piece of wood, waiting for Sam to begin his usual circuitous route to the point of his visit. 

"I can't believe you're doing that with a scratch stock. You know that they make fancy power tools for that type of work now?" 

"I'm not interested in getting things done fast, just right. It soothes me, taking my time to add the details."

"You sound just like Bobby." 

"Yeah, well, he taught me everything I know." 

Bobby had passed two years ago, and not a day goes by that Dean doesn’t still ache, and he feels his loss in every curl of wood that falls to the floor as he works. He removes the piece he's been working on from the vise, deftly putting another in its place before he finishes speaking. 

"Dean," Sam says, then hesitates. Dean waits, his hands moving of their own accord, methodically etching another bead into the wood while Sam sighs behind him. "Do you ever think that you're just going through the motions? Letting the days of your life march on and on, until the time they come to an end."

Dean finally stops what he's doing, setting the tool aside and turning to lean against the bench, crossing his arms over his chest as he glares at Sam. "You know, if you're going to pop in for the first time in weeks and just be morose the least you can do is bring whiskey."

"It's nine in the morning."

"We're of Irish descent, we'll just call it coffee." 

"_Dean_."

"Why are you here, Sam?"

"Eileen," Sam starts, looking at him sheepishly, and Dean leans his head back as he rolls his eyes. "She keeps asking when you’re going to come over for dinner. I told her you're not the social type." 

"That's not true. I socialize."

"Playing games with Charlie on the internet is not socializing, Dean, come on."

Dean clenches his jaw as he turns back to face his work table, picking up his tools once again. "You don't know what you're talking about."

Sam doesn't take the hint, barreling ahead with his minor in psychology as a battering ram. "I just feel like you’ve been in a rut ever since...since I graduated and moved back here. All you do is work in the shop, and then come home and work some more in the house." Dean's only answer is to scrape the scratch stock along the wood as loudly as possible. "You don't even date."

"I date!" 

"Occasionally hooking up with another lonely person to get laid is not 'dating' in any sense of the word, and you've done nothing else since you broke up with Cassie. That was five years ago."

"I know how long ago it was!" His voice is sharper than he intends.

"I'm sorry, it's just...you seemed so happy when you were with her, content, ready to settle down. You told me you were going to propose and the next thing I know you’ve broken up.”

The ring is still in the glove compartment of the Impala, shoved into the back. He'll see it sometimes when he goes looking for a pen, or the tire pressure gauge, the bright velvet undimmed by time, blood red like the wound she left in him. 

He stops his work, setting aside the stock with a sigh, leaning on the workbench with his back to Sam. 

"What do you want from me?"

He can hear Sam breathing through his nose and turns to see him running both hands through his hair, then lacing his fingers behind his head as he stares at his shoes. "I want you to be happy." He drops his arms but doesn't raise his eyes. "Living your life, not just...existing in it." Sam finally raises his head, and his eyes look damp. "You’re no better than Rufus, living alone in that Montana cabin since he retired." Dean wonders if he should feel anger, or pity, or sympathy, but instead he just feels tired.

"I don't know how to give you want you want."

Sam closes his eyes and takes a deep breath, as though he's mentally preparing himself, and Dean unconsciously tenses as he waits for the bomb to drop.

"Do you still remember that night? The night we met the goblin king?"

For a moment Dean has the sensation of falling, like whatever has been supporting his weight has dropped out from beneath him. He leans heavily against the workbench, then slides down to sit on the cold concrete floor. Sam gives him a few minutes, then follows suit, facing him in the dingy light of the bare bulb above them.

"You told me you never wanted to talk about it again," Dean says dully. "You told me you wanted to forget about it all and move on with your life."

"I know, and I did," Sam sighs. "But I get the feeling you didn’t, and you’ve never told me why."

***

"Why today?" They've moved back upstairs to the kitchen where Dean has brewed a fresh pot of coffee, placing a mug in front of Sam that's so large he can wrap both of his giant hands around it, comfortably, and so he does just that. He stares into the pool of steaming liquid, gathering his thoughts for a few minutes, then keeps his eyes on the mug when he speaks.

"I want to tell Eileen about what happened."

"You want to do _what_?" Dean sits heavily in the chair opposite Sam, his own fresh mug of coffee nearly sloshing onto the table. "Jesus, Sam, why would you..."

"Because I want to marry her." 

Dean sits back in his chair in surprise. "Wow, that's. I didn't realize that you'd, um. I mean, I know you've been dating for a while now but I don't think I realized you guys were already having that conversation."

"We're not," Sam says, shaking his head in regret. "Not yet, anyway, we just moved in together. It's just something I know that I want, but I can't ask her to share a future with me if I'm not willing to share my past with her. I told her all about Dad, about the way we grew up, but...I just feel like I’m lying to her, leaving that part out."

"This could drive her away."

"Yeah." He doesn't look as full of dread as Dean feels. "Something tells me it will be okay, though."

They fall silent, each lost in their own thoughts, sipping their coffee until Dean's mug is completely empty. He slides it to the side and leans into his elbows on the table. 

"You want me to be there when you tell her, don't you?"

"I thought it would also give you a chance to talk to me about it again. Two birds, one stone?"

Dean sighs. "If you want me to do this, you should feed me. It's the least you can do."

Sam smiles, but there's no joy in it. "Tonight at seven?"

***

Dean trudges up the stairs to Sam & Eileen's third floor apartment with a bottle of wine in each hand and a sense of trepidation, tucking one bottle under his arm so that he can knock, shifting his weight from one foot to the other until Sam finally opens the door. 

"You're right on time," Sam says as he closes the door behind him. "I thought you'd be at least an hour late."

He presses both bottles against Sam's chest, who brings his arms up to cradle them. "One red, one white. I hope it's enough."

"You needn't have, I'm pretty sure Eileen buys Tully by the case." 

"Yes, but whiskey is for _dessert_," says a nearby voice, and Dean turns to grin at Eileen. "Hey big brother, " she says, giving him a hug with easy affection. He's not surprised that Sam wants to marry her; she both cares for and challenges him in ways that none of his other girlfriends ever have, and he thinks Sam needs that fire, that spark. Dean presses a light kiss into her hair before he pulls away to look at her. 

"You're a girl after my own heart."

She raises an eyebrow at him. "That's just because you Winchester boys are easy to catch. You just have to set traps with liquor and food."

Dean laughs, but it does nothing to ease the tension in him. He can't shake the certainty that, soon after tonight, his brother will find himself single again. He even made up the guest room after Sam had left the house, opening the windows to let out the stale air as he dusted and vacuumed, then put a set of clean sheets on the bed and fluffed the pillows -- the room in readiness a subtle way of saying _I told you so_. 

"So, what's for dinner?" he asks, sniffing the air and rubbing his hands together with genuine enthusiasm. "Do I smell lasagna?"

Eileen giggles and takes him by the elbow. "Right this way, Garfield." Sam busies himself with opening the wine as Dean lets Eileen give him plates and silverware to set the table. He spies a steaming basket covered with a tea towel on the counter.

"Is that garlic bread?"

"Shoo," Eileen says, waving another towel at him, and he dutifully does his assigned task before he takes a seat. He watches the easy way that Sam and Eileen move around one another in the small space of their kitchen, and it makes him cringe inside at the thought that Sam will lose this. 

They make idle chit chat as they eat, and Dean helps himself to two servings of lasagna and a proportionate amount of garlic bread, much to Eileen's delight. He debates at first whether or not he should remain sober for the conversation to come, but he finally decides that it won't make him seem any more or less believable, so he's on his third glass of merlot by the time their plates are empty and pushed to the side. Sam catches the look on his face and straightens up in his seat, turning to sign something to Eileen, also speaking aloud for Dean's benefit. 

"I asked Dean to come over tonight to talk about something," he says, and Eileen's eyes flicker to Dean's face before moving back to Sam's hands. "Something important."

"What's this?" she asks, her demeanor serious as she senses the change in the air. Her eyes move back to his with a question, and Dean clears his throat. 

"On the night of Sam's thirteenth birthday, something happened to us. Something strange."

"I'm intrigued."

Dean looks at Sam, asking again with his eyes if he's sure, if it's not too late.

"I did something really stupid," Sam continues for him. "I made a wish, and it came true."

"What kind of wish?" Eileen's tone is amused, almost playful, and Dean wonders how long it will last.

"A terrible one. It got our baby brother Adam kidnapped, and it's only because of Dean that we managed to get him back."

"Oh my god," she says, looking between the two of them. "Who took him?"

"Castiel," Dean says, too quickly. Names have power, he knows, but several years of saying it in vain have shown him that this one doesn’t, not for him, not anymore. Eileen's face is a question mark, the motion of Dean's lips not making any sense to her, and she looks to Sam for help. 

He hesitates for a moment, curling the fingers of his hand into a C before he changes his mind and signs something else entirely. 

"The goblin king," he narrates with his movements, and Dean closes his eyes in resignation when Eileen gasps aloud.

"Well," she finally says. "That's not at all what I was expecting. Are you trying to one up me, Sam?" 

"No," he says with a chuckle, shaking his head. "I would have told you before, but it didn't feel right to tell you without Dean."

"One up...what?"

"Oh, the other night I told Sam the truth about how I went deaf. Did you never wonder?"

"No, I just thought, well."

"Yeah, most people assume I was born this way. I let them think so. It's easier."

"Easier than what?"

"Than explaining that a banshee's wail destroyed my hearing when it killed my parents." She says it so casually, so matter-of-fact, and Dean just sits back in his chair.

"This is why you weren't worried about telling her," Dean says to Sam, who surprisingly doesn't look smug. 

"Yeah, well. It wouldn't be as much fun to let you know I had an edge. A banshee is a type of fairy that..."

"I know what a banshee is, Sam, I read."

"Comic books don't count, Dean."

"Clearly you've never read any, and they most certainly _do _since I know what a banshee is."

"Fine. Whatever." 

"Anyway," Eileen says pointedly, rolling her eyes at the two of them. "I told Sam about it last night, and I was surprised by how well he took it. I guess I know why."

"You don't think we're, I don't know, delusional?"

She scoffs at the word. "My Nan used to tell me stories about the goblin kingdom, all the fairy lands, actually. In the village where I grew up it's just accepted that other beings, other realms, interact with ours. Most of the world isn’t like that anymore, but there are still some small places that believe." They both watch as Eileen goes to a bookshelf in the corner, scanning the volumes until she pulls one out to bring back to the table. It's old, the linen of the hardcover worn thin in a few places, the pages fragile as she flips through them; it's only a few minutes before she finds what she's searching for, opening the book flat on the table in front of Dean and pointing to an illustration that takes up the entirety of one page. "If what you're saying is real, then I bet you'll recognize this."

"Holy shit," Dean gasps, reaching out to touch the page with his fingertips. "That's the labyrinth," he whispers, looking up to meet Eileen's eyes, and she smiles.

"You really did it," she says in wonder, glancing from one to the other. "I could see Sam putting a ruse like this together..."

"Hey, now, that's not fair!"

"...but you don't seem the type, Dean." She gives him an assessing look. "So how'd it happen?"

"Maybe we should open the whiskey first."

She obliges, pouring a couple of fingers for each of them, and Dean rolls the tumbler in between his palms, wondering how to start. 

_Start at the beginning. _

“Right,” he says, taking a fortifying sip. “Sam’s thirteenth birthday.”

He doesn’t look at them as he tells the story, Sam signing it all for Eileen as he speaks, but Dean notices Sam’s hesitation when he explains things he’s never heard before: the way he was drawn to Castiel, the fever dream of the masquerade when he ate the peach, and especially what happened when the clock struck thirteen after they were separated.

*******

"How long does this self-flagellation usually take?" Eileen asks him thirty minutes later, her eyes following Sam as he paces back and forth on the small balcony that juts out from their apartment, muttering to himself and flailing his hands about. He’d stood up from the table after Dean talked about the deal he had to make, excusing himself from the room and leaving Eileen and Dean to clean up after dinner in companionable silence.

They've moved to the living room now, relaxing on the sofa while they watch Sam trying to manage his guilt in the span of a three-by-eight foot space. Dean turns to face her so she can read his lips, though he swears to himself that he'll be taking ASL classes as soon as possible, because Eileen really is worth learning an entire language for. 

"Oh, usually less than an hour. There's a tell for when he nears the end of it, though, like in poker." 

He glances back through the glass, watching Sam pace a bit more, then come to a complete stop with his hands on his hips. "Wait, here it comes. The patented Sam Winchester Hair Comb." Sure enough Sam runs both his hands through his hair at the same time, then laces his fingers together on the back of his head while taking a deep, calming breath. Eileen laughs, the sound of it warm and rich, and Dean smiles to hear it. He'd been certain, at the outset of this night, that when Eileen finally laughed at him it would be with hard, cold derision. Instead it's full of mirth and kinship, and his eyes prickle a bit with the relief he feels. 

Sam finally throws back the sliding glass door, slinking into the living room and flopping into the opposite arm chair, as though they're getting ready to play _Cards Against Humanity_ instead of discuss hidden realms of magic and monsters. He signs something to Eileen. 

"You were just a kid," she signs back, also talking out loud for Dean's benefit. "Kids are idiots."

He sighs, looking at Dean. "No wonder you moved out after graduation." Dean says nothing, but the look on his face must speak volumes. "What?"

"Is that why you think I moved out? To get away from you?"

"It's okay. I clearly deserved it. Christ. I was such an asshole that day, too.”

"Sam, no," he says, shaking his head. "Dad told me that since I was eighteen and had a job I needed to learn to shift for myself after graduation."

"You have got to be kidding me. You mean all this time I thought..." He trails off, slumping in his chair. "Shit. Dad was such an asshole." 

“Yeah, well.” Dean shrugs. These are things he's long since ceased to be angry about, especially since there's no outlet for it anymore. 

“Would you have still made the deal, if you’d known?” Sam shakes his head. “Never mind. Of course you would. That was how you were taught, to sacrifice yourself for my sake.”

“I’m sure it didn’t hurt that the goblin king was hot,” Eileen mutters into her glass. 

“Nobody said he was hot!”

“You’re right, that part definitely did not hurt,” Dean says to her with a sigh.

“What?”

“Oooh, have you been having a torrid affair all these years?”

“He’s not even gay, Eileen!”

“I’m bi, Sam, thank you very much. Did you really think Ketch and I were just friends?” 

Sam does his best impersonation of a goldfish.

“Dean, please enunciate clearly and look right at me when you describe all the different ways you’ve shagged the goblin king over the years, because Sam doesn’t know any of the filthy words in ASL.”

“That _isn’t funny._ That monster kidnapped Adam, made Dean and I run through his silly house of horrors to get him back, and you’re acting like this is an episode of _Sex and the Goblin Realm_.”

“It was just the one time,” Dean says to Eileen, ignoring Sam completely. “Right after Cassie and I broke up.”

“Oh my god, you used the goblin king for _rebound sex_?” 

“Sam, maybe you should go back out on the balcony for a while, before you have an aneurysm.”

Eileen has also decided to ignore Sam completely, hugging her knees and leaning closer to Dean on the couch. 

“Ignore him. Tell me everything.”

It’s a lot easier to talk about Castiel when he can tell the truth about who he is, and all the things he’s kept locked up inside for years rush out of him: the trepidation and fear he felt, his anger at feeling manipulated, the attraction that simmered beneath all of that from the start. The way they got to know one another, and how he began to see Castiel differently.

“The way he always listened to me no matter what I talked about, whether it was learning something in the shop or travelling to so many different places; he was always fascinated by everything I had to say. It was intoxicating, you know? To be the sole focus of someone’s attention. He’d create a fantastic environment every year just for my visit, stunning illusions, like dreams brought to life. For a long time, especially after I started seeing Cassie, I thought that was just something that happened to me once a year, that it wasn’t real. That I needed to remember not to get caught up in the illusion, because it had nothing to do with my everyday life. Then I realized I was basically living my life waiting for that night, each year, when I would see him again.”

“Did you dump Cassie for the goblin king?” Sam asks, incredulous.

“No, I dumped Cassie for digging into my past like I was some kind of assignment,” Dean says hotly, and Sam balks. “I never told her about any of it, because I was never ready for her to know about that part of me. She never asked, and so I never said. Turns out she never asked because she already knew. Knew about what happened to Mom, knew about Dad’s drinking and his arrests, how we barely went to real school. Even found out about that time I got picked up for shoplifting, even though my juvenile record is sealed.” He pours himself more whiskey. “Not surprised she’s doing great in New York.”

“Fuck.”

“Yeah. That’s when I started wondering what parts of my life were really an illusion.”

“Okay,” Eileen says. “So the next time you saw the goblin king you let him do dirty things to you. Please explain why that has only happened _one time.”_

“Because he never came back.” He closes his eyes against the sting of it. The way he’d sat up all night, at first rehearsing all the things he’d been waiting a year to say, then wondering if he’d ever get to say them. 

Castiel had never showed then, or any night since. 

"You _miss _him," Sam says in wonder. "Don't you?"

"Yeah." Dean lets his head fall back against the couch, closing his eyes. "At first he was an obligation, then he was a friend, and then he was...so much more. I didn't know what to do with that, and I thought I'd have time to figure it out -- but he never came back. I needed him and he never came back.” His voice cracks, and he takes a breath to steady himself. “And for the last five years I haven't been able to stop thinking about _why_."

He picks up his head to see a stricken Sam, doing the math in his head, connecting all the dots. “Do you think it’s because of what happened to Adam?”

“What? Why?”

“Well, think about it: you made the deal because I didn’t reach the end with you, and I’m the one who made the wish. He let you bargain so that we could all go home, but what if...what if Adam’s death means that contract is null and void?” 

“I don’t think the goblin king has a law degree, Sam.”

“He could be right, though,” Eileen says thoughtfully. “If the terms of the agreement were bound to Adam’s freedom, then maybe his death released you from the contract.”

“But after...after that last time we saw each other, I thought things had changed between us. I can’t believe he would just disappear and not tell me.” 

"There's an easy solution to this problem," Eileen says as she looks from one to the other, her gaze calculating. "Sam, what time is it?" 

"Uh." He fumbles for his phone, peering at the time. "Damn, it's almost midnight. Why?"

Eileen nods, turning to look at Dean, and a strange realization begins to creep over over him, like the tide moving in from the sea. 

"It can't be that easy."

"Or it could be," she says. "There's only one way to find out."

"Guys, what..."

"I wish the goblins would come and take you away," Eileen says, staring right at Dean. "Right now."

"Eileen what the hell are you..." Sam starts to say, but the rest of the sentence dies on his lips as thunder rumbles in the distance, and rain suddenly starts to patter against the glass of the balcony doors. "No. It can't be."

His legs numb from sitting so long on the floor, Dean stands up clumsily, suddenly nervous and sweating. He wipes his clammy palms against his jeans, clearing his dry throat, wondering if he looks as much of a mess as he feels. A flash of lightning illuminates the room and the rain comes harder, a full throated crash of thunder making them all jump. 

"He's really coming," Dean says. "What if he's pissed that we called him here? Maybe he just got bored with me."

"I guess we're about to find out," Sam says, and he and Eileen stand as well, and the air in the room grows heavy as Sam backs away from the balcony doors, taking Eileen's hand. 

Even prepared for it, Dean jumps when the door slides open on its own, blowing rain into the room as well as a figure clad all in black -- just not the person they were expecting.

"Who the hell are you?"

The man takes a step back, putting one hand on his chest.

"I'm pretty sure you rang _me_, you fools, I should hope that you know."

"Who are you?" Sam is practically shouting, hands clenching into fists about to strike. "What are you doing here?" 

"That's rude, inviting someone to visit and then demanding to know why they've come."

"We were expecting someone else," Eileen says smoothly, clearly not as rattled as the brothers are. 

"Where is Castiel?"

The man, blond where Castiel is dark but carrying the same regal air, studies Dean closely for a moment before something in his gaze shifts. He snaps his fingers and points. "You're that mewling boy Castiel thought himself in love with. Dean." 

"He...what?"

"Well this is certainly an unexpected surprise," the man says gleefully, his eyes moving to Sam before he steps forward to poke him in the shoulder with one finger. Sam gives him a look of reproach. "What the hell have you been feeding this one? He's enormous!" Eileen laughs, and the man before them gives her a lecherous grin before he takes her hand to press a gallant kiss to the back of it. "I am Balthazar, dear lady, at your service.”

“You’re _Balthazar_,” Dean says dully. “Here to speak for Castiel.”

“Oh, you know of me? Well, that _is _a surprise. I never imagined that I would come up.”

“Look, if this is about...I’m sorry, okay? I knew you were together, and I shouldn’t have…”

“Together? Good god, what are you talking about?”

“Dean, who is this?”

“Castiel’s boyfriend,” he says sullenly.

“His _brother_,” Balthazar says with wide-eyed surprise. “You either weren’t paying attention or Castiel was being his usually vague and inscrutable self. Perhaps both.”

“I…” Dean searches his memory, but can’t recall when Castiel ever explicitly said what his relationship to Balthazar was. “Fuck. All that time, I thought the two of you were in a relationship.” He collapses onto the sofa with his head in his hands. “Wait, why are you here instead of him?”

“Well, as Castiel has seen fit to abandon his kingdom I now have to do double duty."

"Abandon?" 

"Yes, you know, abandon? When you leave something behind that you're supposed to take care of without telling anyone where you've gone or when you'll be back? Have you not heard it used in a sentence before?" He rolls his eyes, turning to look at Eileen. "This is the human who brought Castiel to ruin? I am deeply embarrassed for him."

"Hey now!"

"Would you like a drink?" Eileen interjects. "You've come all this way, it's the least we can do." Sam shoots her a look, and she glares at him in a way that says _let me handle this_.

"I don't suppose you have any scotch?" Balthazar brightens. 

"No, but I've plenty of whiskey. Tullamore D.E.W. all right with you?"

Balthazar smiles, closing the balcony door behind him with a snap of his fingers before sitting in the chair previously occupied by Sam. "That will do nicely, thank you." Dean watches him in stunned silence as Eileen leave the room. "She has manners. I like her."

He graciously takes his drink when she returns, sipping it as the rest of them sit down, before turning to address her directly. "I don't suppose you called for me to take both of them off your hands? It's out of the ordinary, since they’re both so grown” -- Sam glares at the appreciative look Balthazar gives him -- “but maybe we could find a way to make an exception."

Eileen laughs again, and Sam signs something to her without speaking aloud, looking like he's licked a bitter lemon.

"You stop," she replies saucily, and he sinks back against the sofa and crosses his arms defiantly. Balthazar grins wickedly as he swirls the amber liquid in his glass, looking at the three of them. 

"I like her so much," Balthazar says, turning back to Dean. "Why are you so worried about what happened to Castiel?”

“Because I care about him. I thought we, I mean I thought he understood that I…”

“If this is how badly you express yourself then it’s no wonder things have ended up this way.”

“_Please_,” Dean grates out, clenching his fists. “I don’t understand what happened.”

"Why am I here tonight? I'd like the abridged version, if you please."

"Dean misses Castiel and doesn’t know why he stopped coming. I thought calling him here would get that taken care of," Eileen says succinctly, and both brothers turns to stare at her. "What? That's the short version. The end."

"Thank you, my dear. You can do better than these two, you know."

"I know," she says, patting Sam on the knee as he gawps at her. "But I like them big and dumb."

Balthazar laughs, finishing his drink, then turning to study Dean. “Why should I help you? He’s my brother if not my blood, and you’re nothing to me.” 

“Because he is _everything_ to me, and I thought I was to him. Where did he go?”

Balthazar sighs, putting down his empty glass. “He wandered into the labyrinth, but other than that I don’t exactly know. I suspect he doesn’t want me to.”

“I need to find him,” Dean says. 

“How? The only thing you can do is run the labyrinth again and look for him on the way.”

“Then that’s what I’ll do. Can you take me?”

“That depends,” Balthazar says, frowning at his empty glass. “Is there whiskey for the road?”

“How much can you carry?” Eileen says, getting up. “Three bottles or four?”

“I like her _so_ much,” Balthazar stage whispers to Sam, who just glares at him before standing up.

“I’m coming with you.”

“No, you’re not. You’re staying here with Eileen.”

“Dean, I can’t let you go alone.”

“Yes, you can. I wouldn’t let you go by yourself the first time and look how that turned out. I can find him, I know I can.” Sam takes him by the arm, pulling him aside to whisper in his ear as Eileen comes back in the room with a canvas shopping bag, clinking lightly as she hands it to Balthazar. 

“Do you know what you’re doing?”

“No goddamn idea,” Dean admits. “But I have to try, and I have an idea about who else can help us.” Sam looks at him for a moment before pulling him into a hug, clapping him on the back. “It’s okay, Sammy. I’ll be okay.”

“We still have a lot of shit to talk about,” Sam says in a choked voice as he pulls away. “So you better come back. I’m gonna need my best man here eventually.” Dean nods, not trusting his voice as he pulls away.

“Are you ready?” Balthazar calls over to him. 

“Just a minute,” Dean says. “I’ve got to grab something out of my car.”


	9. Chapter 9

They land on a hilltop that Dean hasn’t seen in fourteen years, but it looks as familiar to him as his own room. Nothing has changed, not even the clock hanging in the branches, counting out its thirteen hours. 

“Why now?” Balthazar asks him as they gaze at the labyrinth in the distance. “Why after all this time?”

“I would have before, if I’d known how.”

“He thought you would move on and forget all about him, and I agreed,” Balthazar confesses as they move down the hill. “He said that he wished he could do the same, but our memories are so very long, Dean. Even for one such as Castiel.”

“What do you mean?”

“We were raised together, but we are not actually related.” 

“You said he was your brother, but not your blood.” Dean’s steps slow, processing this information. “So he’s adopted, so what?”

Balthazar looks at him sideways. “Did he never tell you why he was chosen as king of the goblin realm?”

“I just assumed he was born to it.”

“I suppose that’s true, in a way. Who better to guard a realm of discarded human children than the first of those we were asked to take away?”

Dean remembers that long ago conversation, when Castiel had told him how the goblin realm came to be. 

_The first child brought into the fae realm had been abandoned by his mother in the forest, at the edge of a ring of mushrooms. _

“But that means…

_The baby was imbued with magic, and eventually had no recollection of the humanity he'd been born with._

“He was born human?”

_“_He was, even if he doesn’t remember that part of himself anymore. I’ve always wondered if that’s why he was always so drawn to you. Like calls to like, as it were. Humans always fascinated him, though he always held himself apart even when we walked among them regularly. I think it made him too keenly aware that he no longer belonged.”

“But why me? Why _me_, of all people?”

“It truly is a mystery I’ve been contemplating these many years.” They come to a stop, several yards away from the outer wall of the labyrinth, and it seems just as huge as Dean remembers. “You have thirteen hours to find Castiel, and then…” He tilts his head, looking puzzled. “Actually I don’t know what happens then. I wasn’t exactly paying attention whenever he talked about the rules. I never thought I’d have to fulfill any of the duties.”

“What have you been doing the last five years?”

“Emptying Castiel’s wine cellar. Honestly, Winchester, it’s not like people actually _believe _in the goblin realm anymore. No one had called on Castiel for decades before your brother finally did, and no one had run the labyrinth a single time until the two of you. Most people who make that type of wish are either desperate or cruel, enough so that when faced with this” -- he nods at the massive structure, the wall seeming to go on forever in either direction -- “they suddenly come to terms with their choices.” He gives Dean a look more calculating than usual. “Certainly none have ever dared to brave it twice. Perhaps I should credit you more than I have been.”

“Aren’t you coming?”

“I cannot. Here is where I must leave you, Dean Winchester.”

“But...he’s your _brother_. We can help each other by ruling out all the places you’ve already looked…” Dean attempts, but Balthazar is already shaking his head. 

“Wherever he’s gone, I cannot follow. Only that which is human, or once was, can pass beyond the gate. Don’t you think I would have spent the last five years looking for him, if I could?” He tilts his head, staring up at the walls. “Quite ingenious really, as all of our family are quite meddlesome. It’s why he took you someplace within, year after year.”

“He said you were nosy.”

“Yes,” Balthazar says, grinning. “Life here is just so _boring_. Castiel is the only one who’s ever been interesting.”

“I can take it from here, then,” Dean says with a calm he doesn’t feel. Balthazar turns to face him, bag of whiskey clutched to his chest, and Dean tries not to laugh out loud at the contrast of his regal outfit offset by a canvas bag decorated with cartoonish produce and emblazoned with _Trader Joe’s._

“Should you find my brother, will you relay a message to him for me?” Dean bites his lip as he nods. “Tell him I support whatever _choice _he makes.”

“I’ll find him. I promise.”

Balthazar gives a curt nod and then disappears, leaving only the clinking sound of bottles behind him.

Dean is once again at the beginning of the labyrinth, only this time he’s all alone.

He jogs the distance until he comes up to the wall itself, placing a hand on its surface to assure himself, once again, that this is real.

“I’m coming, Cas.” 

*******

He’s been walking along to the right for about ten minutes, left hand trailing along the wall, trying to spot the door they’d entered through so many years ago. He knows nothing is as it seems here, where straight lines turn crooked and solid walls are doorways, so he’s feeling for a seam with the tips of his fingers as he looks, trying to remember how far they’d walked before they’d run into…

“Oy! What are you doing?”

Startled, his head snaps to the right, seeing a very familiar figure in black standing by a small pool filled with brackish water.

“Crowley?” 

The diminutive man comes closer, blinking a few times as though he’s trying to dispel the illusion before him. “Bloody hell, if it isn’t Dean Winchester, as I live and breathe. You’ve certainly changed.” He peers over Dean’s shoulders. “Where’s that gangly baby deer that trailed after you before?” 

“The baby deer grew into a giant moose, so I left him home. It’s good to see you again, Crowley.”

“Is it?” He gives Dean a calculating look, crossing his arms. “I don’t know how you managed to get here after all these years, but I’m sure it’s not a social visit.” 

“I need to get back into the labyrinth. I need to find Castiel.”

“Oh, you care about the goblin king so much now?” Crowley sneers at him. “I don’t think he wants to be found, especially not by you.”

“But why? I don’t understand. We had...I thought we were finally getting somewhere and then he just stopped coming. One night every year, for the rest of my life, those were the terms. There was no option to end it, so why?”

Crowley looks up at him, face perplexed. “Only he knows for sure. All he said was that he wanted you to be free to choose, and it seemed you’d made your choice. Do you know what he meant?”

Dean shakes his head, even more confused than before. “He never asked me to choose,” he whispers. 

“Maybe he thought he already knew the answer.”

“So he chose for me.”

“That arrogant bastard,” Crowley mutters under his breath. “Sounds just like him.”

“This is why I need to find him, Crowley, I have to fix this. Can you help me, like you did before?”

“Oh, so you think we’re friends now, and I’m just going to take you on a little tour through the old labyrinth for fun?” He looks at Dean’s hands, free of any jewelry, and scoffs. “Sorry, darling, but you’re on your own.” 

“I brought you this.” Dean pulls something out of his pocket, and Crowley’s eyes are immediately drawn to the object in his hand. Dean holds it in his palm, the red velvet bright like a splash of blood, and Crowley reaches for it greedily. Dean pulls it out of reach. “I’ll give you what’s inside, if you take me to Castiel.”

“I can’t,” Crowley says sadly. “I don’t actually know.” 

“Then you can help me look for him. You know the labyrinth better than any other creature in there, and I don’t have much time.” He opens the box, the diamond ring from the future he didn’t choose glittering inside, making Crowley’s eyes shine. “If you help me find the entrance again, and stay with me _the whole time_,” he clarifies, and Crowley grins wickedly, “I will give you this.” He turns the box so the diamond catches the light, and Crowley reaches out with greedy hands but Dean holds the box out of reach and he sighs.

“Fine,” he says, snapping his fingers, and a portion of the wall near them opens up. They enter the same stone corridor as before, its appearance as familiar to Dean as the walls of his bedroom, even after all these years. Crowley snaps his fingers again, and the wall shuts behind them with a crash. “You could at least give me a downpayment. Let me hold the pretty container, at least.”

Dean removes the ring and tucks it into the front pocket of his jeans, handing the empty box to Crowley, who turns it over in his hands with a soft smile as he rubs the velvet.

“Where did he enter the labyrinth, do you know that much?”

“From the castle,” Crowley says, rubbing the box against his cheek. “I know a shortcut that will take us there.”

“That information would have been really useful _fourteen years ago_.”

“Your payment wasn’t as generous fourteen years ago.”

Dean shakes his head. “You’re sure he never went back to the castle?”

“Balthazar would definitely have found him if he had. He practically tears it apart every time he’s there, searching for any sign that Castiel has been there.”

“He said he couldn’t pass beyond the barrier, how can he get into the castle?”

Crowley laughs before indicating a portion of the wall ahead, no doubt one of the many hidden entrances disguised as just more stone. Dean confirms by putting his hand into it, watching it disappear up to his elbow before walking into it completely and into the first portion of the maze proper. “He can transport himself in and out of the castle itself, but into the goblin city, or the actual labyrinth -- no, there he cannot go. Castiel would have put a barrier around the entire castle, if he did not love his brother so well. No matter what you may think, he built the labyrinth for the sole purpose of shutting out the rest of the world, when they became too much for him to tolerate.”

“He told me the goblin realm was created for all the human children, when they became too many for the fae to deal with.” 

“The realm, yes, along with the castle and the foundations of the city around it. Beyond that? Everything is his creation.”

“He never told me.” 

“And you didn’t put it together yourself, after all the pretty illusions he created for years, trying to seduce you?”

Dean glares at his grinning face, then takes a closer look at their surroundings. “Those were all amazing, though, and this place is just…”

“Gloomy? Melancholy? Depressed?”

“Deteriorating,” he finally answers, spinning in a slow circle. “I know it’s been a long time, but it looks, well.”

“Like the walls themselves might crumble,” Crowley answers, nodding. “Yes. It used to be a beautiful place, so much like those little pockets he would make for you, but it began to reflect his mood long before you and your brother ever came. Now it’s falling apart at an alarming rate, and there’s very little we can do to stave it off forever. That it still stands at all is the only reason we know he’s not dead.”

“Then why did you give me such a hard time about helping me find him?”

“Because I am _contrary,_” Crowley spits out in reply, hissing through his clenched teeth. 

“Okay, okay,” Dean says, turning a corner to see a familiar sight through an opening in the next corridor: four soldiers, guarding two doors from behind their red and blue shields. “Great. Talking to these guys went so well the last time.” He cringes at the thought, the thing that still haunts his nightmares. _See, Dean? I figured it out! It's a piece of cake! _Sam had said as he walked through one of those doors, turning back to Dean with a grin, just before he’d fallen into the abyss below. Dean shudders, thinking of the hands that haunt his nightmares sometimes, dark dreams that returned to him after Castiel went away forever.

“We should talk to them, see if they know anything.”

“Please, those guys just talk in circles, we aren’t going to get anywhere.”

Crowley rolls his eyes. “I’ll do all the talking, and we don’t have to go through the doors, you large man child, don’t worry. I’m not pulling you out of the oubliette again.”

*******

“This is impossible,” Dean says hours later. They’ve been through the hedge maze, the fiery forest, and the enchanted forest, but no one has any idea where their king might be hiding, and haven’t seen any sign of him. Now they’re walking along the edge of the vast Junk Fields between them and the city. “We can’t get through the whole place before the time is up, and asking everyone if they’ve seen him is equally useless.”

“We could be talking right _to _him and not even know it. He does love a good disguise.”

“I would know him,” Dean says, though the tiniest doubt tickles at the back of his mind. “We have to work smarter than this. Where could he go where he’d never run into anyone?”

“The Bog of Eternal Stench, but I refuse to go looking there. You _know_ how I feel about the bog. No one of any sense goes there on purpose.” 

“What about Sir Didymus?” 

“I said no one _of any sense_.”

“Could he have created one of those illusions like he used to take me to?”

“They use too much magic to go unnoticed. I’d have found it already if that were the case.”

“You went looking?” 

“Of course I went looking, you twit. He’s my king.”

“Oh, and you’re such a loyal and obedient subject?”

“Obedient? Of course not, don’t be a fool.”

“Loyal?”

Crowley comes to a stop, looking out over the detritus of the junkyard. “I was no infant when my mother decided to trade me away, maybe six or seven. She didn’t just want me taken off her hands, though. No, she wanted to barter with the goblin king himself.”

“For what?” 

“Power. She was a witch, and a fairly good one, but she wanted to be more than a purveyor of healing poultices and herbs in a tiny little village. Which is fair, honestly. I would have wanted the same, if I’d been her.” He shrugs. “She summoned Castiel, and offered to trade me for the secret to greater power. I still remember the way he looked at her, cool and calculating -- but when he looked at me it there was sympathy in his eyes. So he agreed to her request, and I’ll never forget the triumphant smile on her face. He picked me up and sat me on his hip, then leaned down and said a single word to her.” 

“What did he say?”

“_Practice._” Crowley grins, and Dean can see the entire scene play out in his mind, almost as if he’d been there. “So yes, I am very loyal to him, even if I don’t always act the part prettily enough for you.”

“I thought he was so menacing, when I first met him.”

“You were meant to. From his perspective you were just a couple of foolish boys being careless with your charge, but you gave him pause with your impassioned plea to have your baby brother back, even though it wasn’t your mistake. Something about you shook him to the core, so much that it frightened Balthazar to see. I think he knew, then, that you would be the thing that cracked the carefully constructed facade Castiel had hidden behind for so many years. And he was right.”

“But I _didn’t_. Or if I did, I don’t know _how_. What happened when you saw him last? Think. Even something small could be important. Was it right after my last visit?”

“No, it wasn’t until after he’d gone to see you, obviously.” Crowley rolls his eyes, but Dean stops in his tracks. 

“What do you mean, to see me? I haven’t seen him since the last time I was here.”

“You mean he didn’t even talk to you? After all the work I did, scrounging through this damn junkyard to find acceptable human clothing?”

“He came to see me? Why would he do that? Dress as a human, come find me, and not even talk to me?” Dean leans against one of the large piles of trash, thinking. 

“He said he didn’t want to spend another year waiting for you.”

“So what changed?” Crowley shrugs again, and Dean clenches his jaw in frustration. “He came back here, then what?”

“His demeanor was quite altered from when he left. I hadn’t been expecting him back so soon. He sent a message to Balthazar and then left the castle. I followed him into the city, but before we even reached the gates he stopped and told me to stop skulking after him and at least keep him company.”

“Did you ask where he was going?” Crowley just glares at him, and Dean holds up his hands.

“He said he would be in the labyrinth for some time, that I should take care of things in his absence. I followed him until he went into the bog, but...” 

“Yeah, I know how you feel about the bog.”

“He’s not still in there. Didymus checked and there’s nowhere to hide, otherwise everything that’s banished there would be doing it.”

“Did he say anything else?”

“Just that he needed to forget.”

“Wait. What exactly did say?”

“He said, _exactly_, ‘I need to go someplace I can forget for a while.’ Happy, handsome?”

“Forget,” Dean murmurs to himself. “He told Balthazar he thought I would forget him.”

_He said that he wished he could do the same, but our memories are so very long, Dean. Even for one such as Castiel._

When they’d first come back from the labyrinth, Dean had spent a lot of time reading and rereading that story in Sam’s old book, but that hadn’t been all. He’d done as much research as he could while waiting for Sam to do his homework at the local library, and he’d spent some time looking things up online, too. Trying to determine if it had been real, or trying to make sense of it all. 

The one thing that made him shudder to learn about is the thing that still visits him sometimes in nightmares, except in those there is no Crowley to rescue them from the certainty of their fate: shut into a hole in the ground with no means of escape, alone in the dark, trapped where no one will ever know to look for them. 

A place to forget, and be forgotten.

“I know where he is,” he breathes in a moment of certain understanding. “He’s in the oubliette.”

*******

Castiel sits against the wall hugging his knees, staring at the lone shaft of sunlight that spills through the opening high above him, illuminating a circle of the stone floor. Nothing ever changes here except the light, and even that is identical when compared with all the days before it, but it doesn’t matter. He still watches with fixed fascination as the first tendrils of it creep into the cell each morning, growing bold and confident as the day grows on, claiming their space by right of conquest before they concede just as slowly until he finds himself once more all alone in the dark. 

The light’s infinite invasion of his privacy gives him something to focus on until the last moments of each day when it retreats, leaving him in darkness once again. 

The specifics are beginning to fade, now, after nearly two thousand nights of solitude in this place, and he wonders how many more it will take for him to forget the sight of that pretty woman with her arms around Dean in the graveyard. The way he’d sunk into her like it was exactly the comfort he’d been seeking. The flash of the diamond ring she’d held in her hand as they sat in Dean’s car. He had suddenly understood what humans mean when they talk about heartbreak: as though the organ had been ripped from his chest and tossed over the edge of a cliff, beating futilely as it plummeted to the rocks below, where it shattered into a thousand pieces like so much glass. 

The feeling must fade, eventually, and he will sit here until it does. 

His study of the light’s initial appearance today is interrupted by the sounds of commotion in the distance, though he cannot tell exactly where. Voices arguing from somewhere on the other side of the wall, out in the maze of tunnels. They sound familiar, but as he strains to distinguish their origin or make out the words they’re gone again. He relaxes the muscles he didn’t realize he’d tensed up, slumping back against the wall. He’s still safe here, hidden away, and he’s glad he had the presence of mind to seal off the secret entrance in the corridor. He returns to his daily contemplation.

Some time later there is another interruption, this time from far above him. He strains again to hear, but suddenly the light is blocked completely and he can make out the sounds of the helping hands, far above him. He sighs, wondering which foolish creature has fallen into the four guards’ trap. Probably a wayward goblin, looking for adventure, and he shall have to give it a stern talking to and wipe its memory before transporting it somewhere else to find amusement. 

The tiny entrance far at the top of the oubliette opens and a figure tumbles out of the darkness, landing in a heap on the floor. The pool of light falls on a form that’s much larger than a goblin, and Castiel frowns, creeping closer as the figure stands upright and brushes itself off. It’s facing the other direction so Castiel can’t see its face, but the shape of it is achingly familiar. 

“Castiel?” The figure turns slowly, scanning the darkness all around. “Please tell me you’re here.”

He moves forward, keeping himself low to the ground. It could be a trick of some kind, or a hallucination. He’s had them before, down here, in the dark. He needs to get close enough to touch, to see if this is real before he tries to unmask its true face, and he moves as quietly as possible until he’s right at the edge of the pool of light, crouched low, poised to strike. 

It turns in his direction, the light from the opening of the oubliette falling on its face, and Castiel falls onto his knees.

“Dean?” The figure comes closer, and Castiel blinks up at it, unable to comprehend. “Is it really you?” 

“Yeah,” Dean says, reaching out to cup his face with one hand, thumb caressing his lower lip and then his cheekbone. “It’s really me, Cas.”

“You can’t be.” The realization hits hard, and he scrambles away until his back is pressed against the wall. “It’s impossible for you to be here.” 

“But I am,” Dean says, not leaving the circle of light. “I thought we called you, but Balthazar showed up instead. He brought me here.”

“I’ll send you back, I’m sorry, he shouldn’t…”

“No!” Dean moves into the dark so quickly that Castiel doesn’t register his nearness until he feels his hands, gripping his shoulders. “Don’t you dare send me anywhere. Crowley and I have been combing this place for hours to find you, and now that I have I’m not leaving without you, you understand?” 

“No,” Castiel says petulantly. “No, I don’t understand.”

“Castiel.” The hands move up from his shoulders to cradle his face. “Why did you never come back?”

“I-- I was-- I mean I did, not long after. I wanted to see you, I couldn’t wait any more, and I knew you weren’t expecting me so I wanted to blend in, just in case. When I didn’t find you at home I went to your former residence, and then I went to the home of young Adam.” He reaches up to wrap his hands around Dean’s wrists. “I did not know what had happened. Your true father answered the door, he explained before he told me where to find you. I wanted...I wanted to comfort you.” He pulls Dean’s hands away from his face, pushing him back, and Dean sits on the floor across from him. 

“That was you in the tan coat, wasn’t it?” 

“I did not mean to intrude on your privacy, but I soon realized that...that I didn’t belong there. With you. Not like she did.” Dean says nothing, so Castiel decides to twist the knife. “I hope you are happy.”

“Happy? No, Cas, I’m not _happy_. I’ve spent the last five years wondering what happened to you! Were you finally bored with me? Did you just get the one thing you wanted? Was it so terrible that you never wanted to think about me again? Did your boyfriend find out we’d been together, and forbidden you to come back? By the way, I thought Balthazar was your boyfriend this entire goddamn time, so thanks for never clarifying that.” Castiel scoffs, but Dean doesn’t smile. “The worst part was wondering if you were dead, because that was the only explanation I could think of that would make all of the others untrue.”

“I’m sorry, Dean.”

“Then _why_?”

“Because I couldn’t stand the thought of retrieving you from her bed every year. You were quite angry with me the one time I did, as I recall. I saw the ring she was holding, I knew what it meant.”

“You thought I was proposing. At a funeral.” He shakes his head. “Do you know where that ring is now, Cas?”

“Dean, please don’t…”

“Crowley has it in his greedy little hands at this very moment, prancing about the courtyard with glee and watching the way the light plays off the stone. I used it to purchase him as a guide, and once we were sure you were here he demanded I hand it over.” Dean laughs lowly. “I don’t think that’s who the clerk had in mind when they told me it would look beautiful on any finger.”

“But…”

“I haven’t seen Cassie since that day. I didn’t even know she was coming. It was nice of her, actually. We’d been broken up for weeks, since before the night you and I...well.” He takes a deep breath, meeting Castiel’s eyes. He can’t see their color here, in the dark, but he can well imagine them. “You were the one I wanted then, Cas. You’re still the only one I want.”

“Dean, I don’t…” Whatever argument he’s going to make is forgotten as Dean leans forward to kiss him. 

“I’ve spent the last five years thinking about everything I always meant to say to you, and I don’t care what you think you knew about me or what I wanted. I love you, Castiel, and I want to spend the rest of my life showing you just how much. Any argument you plan to make is null and void, because no one retreats to a lonely prison to lick their wounds unless they’re in love with the person that inflicted them. I don’t want to argue, I don’t want to talk around the subject, and I don’t want to be in this damp stone cellar any longer.”

“But where, Dean? Will you give up your humanity to stay here, with me?”

“If that’s what it takes.”

“I don’t want that for you! I already hate this place, do you think I could live with myself if I trapped you here as well?”

“I’d ask you to come with me, but you can’t leave, can you? The labyrinth, and everything in it, is tied to your magic, isn’t it?” 

“How do you know that?”

“It’s been deteriorating since you exiled yourself here. Crowley told me it used to be a beautiful place, but it reflects your mood, and so it hasn’t been for a long time.” Castiel sags against him. “There’s a solution here Cas, we just have to find it. Maybe we could talk to Balthazar?”

“I don’t know about that. He was never a fan of what I did when it came to you.”

“He was willing to bring me here so that I could find you. He even made me promise to give you a message: ‘tell him I support whatever _choice _he makes.’ He said it just like that. He seemed sure you would know what he meant.”

“Choice,” Castiel whispers. “Whatever _choice _I make.” He closes his eyes, taking a deep breath. “Would you take me into your life, if that were possible?”

“Cas,” Dean says, pressing their foreheads together. “My life has been empty without you in it. Whatever I do for the rest of it, I want to do it with you, and not for one night out of the year, but every night. Forever.”

“Take my hand, Dean.” He holds out his right, palm up, and Dean grins before sliding his own into it, like the beginning of a dance they’ve done a dozen times before. 

“Where are we going?” Castiel doesn’t answer, but by the time Dean’s finished with his question they are standing in the throne room of the castle at the center of the labyrinth. He snaps his fingers, tapping his foot impatiently as Dean watches him with an amused smile. 

“Castiel!” Balthazar says as he appears in the room. “Where have you been? I can’t believe the human was the one to find you after all.”

“Your Majesty,” Crowley says, entering the room. “It is wonderful to see you again.”

Castiel waves his hand impatiently. “I have called you here to bear witness. I have chosen my successor.”

“Of course, Majesty.”

“What? Castiel, I don’t think…” 

“You told Dean you would support whatever choice I made, yes?”

“Yes, but, I don’t want the job!”

“That’s fortunate, as I’m not giving it to you.” He turns to Crowley. “Do you accept?”

Crowley blinks at him several times, and Dean wonders if he’s ever truly been struck speechless before. He rallies well before Dean can think of anything clever to say. 

“As Your Majesty commands.”

“It will soon be _your _majesty. Balthazar, will you transport Dean and myself back to his home once we are finished?”

“Of course.”

“No more whiskey for you,” Dean says, pointing at him. “I’m not sure Eileen has any left.”

“Blast, that’s hardly fair!”

“Enough!” Castiel shouts, and they both quiet immediately. He moves to stand before Crowley, putting a hand on his shoulder. “Crowley, I name you protector of this realm and all that reside within it, those here now and all that are to come.” He raises his other hand, placing it over Crowley’s brow, bright light spewing from his fingers. Wind begins to swirl all around them, and Castiel closes his eyes as the air crackles with the charge of electricity as he transfers his power. 

“What’s happening?” he hears Dean shout from somewhere behind him.

“He was born human,” Balthazar explains, “and all of humanity has free will.” 

*******

They return to Dean’s own bedroom, he and Balthazar supporting Castiel between the two of them, drained of all his power. 

“I still don’t understand.” He looks at the prone form asleep in his bed, flesh and blood and warm to the touch. “Crowley is the goblin king now, and Castiel?”

“He chose to regain his humanity,” Balthazar whispers softly, brushing back a lock of hair from his brother’s forehead. “He will sleep for some time, regaining his strength. The transfer of so much power, it takes a toll.”

“I’ll take care of him. I promise.”

Balthazar nods once, his steel gaze threatening what will happen if Dean fails to keep that promise. 

“Tell your charming brother and his lovely companion that I send my best, would you? And to keep the whiskey well stocked. You never know when I might pop in for a visit.”

He fades away before Dean can take another breath, and then they are alone. He looks at Castiel, more disheveled and disarmed than he’s ever seen him, sound asleep in the early light of morning. He’s tired himself, bone tired, but there are things to do yet.

First he makes a reassuring phone call to Sam, who immediately drives the Impala back to Dean’s house with Eileen in tow. Dean showers away the cobwebs and dust, moving around the second floor as quietly as he can, but Castiel never moves. Dean stands in the doorway for a while, watching him breathe, then goes downstairs to make some coffee.

_Don’t knock, _he texts Sam. _Just come in._

The Impala’s engine telegraphs their arrival, and Dean waits for them at the door. Sam doesn’t even get off the porch before pulling Dean into a crushing bear hug. 

“You came back.” Sam’s voice is rough with emotion, and Dean claps him on the back before he pulls away. He manages to keep his composure even when he’s pulled into another fierce hug by Eileen, just as tight as Sam’s despite her much smaller size. 

“Did you find him?” she asks when he pulls away, searching his face, smiling wide when she reads the answer in his eyes. “Can we see him?”

“He’s been through a lot, so he’s passed out upstairs, sleeping like the dead.”

“Good, then he won’t hear me coming,” Sam says, darting for the stairs with Eileen on his heels before Dean can even react. They’re already at the door of his bedroom when he reaches the top, curled around each side of the doorframe to peer at the former goblin king like a zoo exhibit.

“He looks much less menacing than I remember,” Sam whispers thoughtfully. “I wasn’t sure how I’d feel, seeing him.”

“How are you going to get those boots off him?” Eileen says with a grin. “Can I watch?” 

Dean laughs lowly when Sam glares at her, then shoos them both back downstairs. “Stop ogling my boyfriend, you minx. Let’s go back downstairs and I’ll tell you everything.”

Several cups of coffee and their rapt attention gives him renewed energy as he tells them the whole story, still unable to believe it himself.

“So what happens now?” Sam asks at the end of the tale, after several minutes spent in silent contemplation.

“I have no idea,” Dean says. “But for the first time in ages, I’m looking forward to tomorrow.”

It’s still early afternoon by the time they each give him a much gentler hug and take their leave. Dean is drawn back upstairs, leaning against the doorway for a while, but watching Castiel sleep is like a drug that pulls him into the bedroom. He doesn’t wake through Dean’s removal of his boots (which he is now _certain_ were put on with magic) and the rest of his clothing, throwing it all into a corner of the room to deal with later before he maneuvers the inert form under the blankets, curling up beside him. He studies that sharp profile in the fading light of the afternoon, telling himself that this is real, that Castiel will be here when he wakes, will be here for good.

*******

He’s not sure what time it is when he wakes again, only that brighter light is coming into the room on the other side of his eyelids, as though he’s slept all through the night and into the morning again. He stretches his limbs, stiff from hours in the same position, but can’t bring himself to leave the warmth of the bed and the body still beside him. He moves closer, one hand reaching out to rest on Castiel’s chest so he can feel the beat of his heart, the rise and fall of his breath.

He’s beginning to doze back off when he feels a shift in the blankets, and a hand comes up to cover his beneath them.

“Where are we?” Castiel asks, his voice rough and husky with a full day’s sleep. “I don’t know this place.”

“This is my house. I bought it after...after Bobby passed away two years ago.”

Castiel turns his head, those blue eyes still amazingly bright and otherworldly, even bereft of magic. “I’m sorry. I know how you cared for him.” Dean nods, inching closer, intertwining the fingers of their other hands together where they’re trapped between their bodies. 

“What did you do, Cas?”

“I transferred my magic to Crowley.” He turns his head to look back up at the ceiling, frowning. “I should have done it long ago. He was happy there for a long time, until…until _I_ became unhappy, and everything reflected my own melancholy. With his stewardship, it can be a fantastic place once more, beautiful and uncomplicated.” He laughs slightly. “I only wish I could see what my brethren will make of him, with his winsome vitriol. I expect they will be fascinated and frightened in equal measure.”

“He’ll be the toast of the next masquerade, probably.”

“Just so.” Castiel grins to himself. “I think he will be very happy.”

“Will you?” Dean asks with a whisper, and Castiel turns somber before turning to face him again.

“I considered this, long ago, when the fae realms began to lose their sway over the world of men, but it was a birthright I no longer remembered. I didn’t know what place I could hold in that world. I’d been raised as one of the fae, given magic and power, and it always felt like an ill-fitting mask -- but it was a part I knew how to play, and that familiarity was comforting for a time.”

“And when it wasn’t?”

“By then, the world of men was an even greater mystery. And so I began building the labyrinth, using it to distance myself from the entirety of the only world I knew, because I couldn’t bear to be in it.”

“What if...what if you can’t bear this one?”

Castiel smiles at him softly. “I could never regret you, not in the span of a hundred human lifetimes, and certainly not in this one. Are you sure you wish me to spend it with you?”

“Your whole life?” 

“It’s only forever. That’s not long at all.”

Dean pulls him closer, tangling their legs together, pressing the word “Yes” into a thousand places on his skin.


End file.
